Book description
Trevor Manuel became South Africa's first black finance minister in
1996, a time when the economy threatened to spiral into a debt trap. It
took five years before Manuel could present his first 'good news' Budget
in Parliament. He described that Budget as a tale of 'irrevocable and
powerful transformation', a tale of 'patience and obstinacy ... of
determination and hope ... Of choice, not fate.' He could have been
telling the tale of his own life. Born into a working-class family on
the Cape Flats, his family's story embodied the fate that befell
thousands of people classified coloured under apartheid. Homes lived in
and lost under the cruel Group Areas Act, a mother who struggled to
bring up her children on a garment worker's wages, clashes with
gangsters who roamed the streets of the Flats, a truncated education.
Manuel stared down fate - and internecine Western Cape politics - to
become one of the most prominent anti-apartheid leaders in the internal
resistance movement of the 1980s. He confronted apartheid's police and
prisons with a boldness that sometimes bordered on recklessness. After
Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Manuel rose quickly
through the ranks of the African National Congress becoming a member of
Mandela's first cabinet. When Mandela appointed him minister of finance
in 1996, business leaders sneered at his lack of qualifications and
experience. When he drove through a tough macroeconomic plan in a
post-apartheid South Africa, some of his own constituency turned on him.
'Obstinate and patient', he saw out the worst until the economy began to
turn. Under his stewardship, South Africa entered its longest growth
period ever. By 2007, he was the world's longest serving minister of
finance and, across the world, the most respected African finance
minister.
