Why persist with the Ramaphosa 2017 campaign when it's obvious he will lose, I asked Pravin Gordhan around June that year. The Ramaphosa campaign was weak and the provincial barons that ran the ANC were on the other side. “You don't fight to win,” he said. “You fight out of conviction; in the end, if you win, you win.”
He had lost his job as finance minister. He was at home in his pyjamas when the TV screens carried the news of a new finance minister in Malusi Gigaba. How he was fired, and persecuted by the National Prosecuting Authority and the Hawks under controversial criminal charges, took a toll on him and his family. At the same time, it catapulted him into being the poster child of the fight against Zuma. It was on the basis of his steadfastness in the political wilderness that a decent campaign for Ramaphosa could be built, and win eventually.
Gordhan was sensitive and complex, warm and charming at the same time. He was brutal against his political opponents and often demanding and crude to his political aides.
Jacob Zuma knew how calculating Gordhan could be, hence he had to be destroyed. Gordhan was finance minister when the National Treasury took control of the Limpopo government as it faced financial collapse. In political terms, this move helped Zuma frustrate his opponents, who were closely associated with Julius Malema.
Zuma saw enough of Gordhan's skills to realise he was a threat. Gordhan felt abused. Some in his circle called Zuma “Mr Kleenex” for using and discarding loyalists.
He could be loyal, too. Gordhan could say no bad thing about Ramaphosa, even when the president dilly-dallied and failed to say yes to his plans on time, whether for Eskom or Transnet. He was a shining star at the South African Revenue Service, and his time at the National Treasury was decent, too, though the picture of low growth and rising public debt invites criticism. It was at the public enterprises department where he struggled.
He is the best intelligence minister we never had
He had put blinkers on, focusing mainly on fighting state capture and ignoring the economic management part of the job. When he believed a theory he was prepared to die carrying out whatever action he thought necessary. For example, Eskom's failures in 2019 — leading to stage 6 load-shedding for the first time — were largely attributed to a fightback by state capturers and their sympathisers.
It might well have been true that there was a co-ordinated campaign to embarrass and weaken Ramaphosa and his new cabinet by infiltrating the electricity production part of Eskom. However, responding to that needed leadership skills to win over the good engineers at Eskom, instead of screaming “state capture” at every turn. A brutal anti-state capture narrative risked cowing the entire organisation into a place where no one wanted to make a mistake lest they be accused of sabotage. A safe engineer was the one who did nothing, even when they could see things falling apart.
Reviving SAA took much of his time as he led the whole department through its role in the business rescue process starting in December 2019. He is the best intelligence minister we never had. His critics thought his background in communist politics was behind his plans to revive SAA. I did not think so. He did not seem ideological to me, although the actions might fit an ideology that propounded big government, something he believed in too. Also, in his view of the role of business, he often spoke about the need for social enterprises instead of businesses driven simply by the profit motive, South Africa needed enterprises that sought to address social issues using sustainable business models.
A part of him wanted to save jobs at SAA; the process crushed the very same people he wanted to save. Some SAA employees were pushed into poverty and lost property while they could not even access debt or their pension savings while the business rescue process went on. It became a rescue where there was no obvious winner. The process of choosing new equity partners appeared flawed, especially regarding the choice of partners and the cost of the assets. People who opposed the revival of SAA were fought. They included Tito Mboweni, then finance minister. In speaking to both, independent of each other, I found them to have commitment to what they thought best for South Africa. Gordhan had to win, and Mboweni was a classic intellectual who would rather torture pilchards in his stove and tweet about it than engage in futile cabinet wars.
Did I mention you could not draft a speech for Gordhan without mentioning that South Africa was a resilient country? My last interaction with him was two weeks ago, when he sent a message in response to my column. “You are absolutely right about the potential SA has!”
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory and was public enterprises spokesperson between 2019 and 2020
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