Trevor Andrew Manuel (born 31 January 1956) is a retired South African politician and former anti-apartheid activist who served in the cabinet of South Africa between 1994 and 2014. He was the Minister of Finance from 1996 to 2009 under three successive presidents. He was also the first post-apartheid Minister of Trade and Industry from 1994 to 1996 and later the Minister in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission from 2009 to 2014. He was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1991 to 2012.
Born and raised in Cape Town, Manuel trained as a construction technician but was a full-time political activist from 1981, initially as the general secretary of the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee. Between 1983 and 1990, he was the regional secretary of the United Democratic Front and a member of the front's national executive. During the negotiations to end apartheid, he worked at Shell House as the head of the ANC's internal department of economic planning from 1991 to 1994.
Elected to the National Assembly in the first post-apartheid elections of April 1994, Manuel was also appointed as the Minister of Trade and Industry in Nelson Mandela's Government of National Unity. During his two years in that portfolio, he championed South Africa's post-apartheid economic liberalisation. He became Mandela's Minister of Finance in a cabinet reshuffle in April 1996 and remained in that office for the next 13 years, serving throughout the terms of Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe. He presided over sustained economic growth in South Africa, which admirers credited partly to the market-friendly Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy of the National Treasury. Though his critics in the Tripartite Alliance derided him as neoliberal, others described him as a pragmatist.
After the April 2009 general election, Manuel was retained in President Jacob Zuma's cabinet as Minister in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission. He oversaw the establishment of the commission, becoming its inaugural chairperson, and presided over the drafting of the National Development Plan 2030, which was adopted in 2012. He announced his retirement from politics ahead of the May 2014 general election. Since 2017, he has been the chairperson of Old Mutual Emerging Markets.
Early life and education Born on 31 January 1956, Manuel grew up in Kensington, a suburb of Cape Town. His parents were Philma van Söhnen, a garment worker, and Abraham James Manuel, who worked for the Cape Town City Council until he died when Manuel was 13. According to Manuel's "family legend", his great-grandparents were a Portuguese immigrant and a Khoekhoe woman; Manuel was classified as Coloured under apartheid.
He attended Windermere Primary School in Kensington and then Harold Cressy High School in District Six. He later said that "politics came to me" when his primary school class was halved by the implementation of the Bantu Education Act, and he was active in local civic organisations as a teenager. He also briefly joined the youth wing of the Labour Party in 1969, at the encouragement of his father, but dropped out due to "peer pressure at school" and due to his own disagreement with the party's decision to participate in the Coloured Representative Council. After matriculating, he completed a tertiary diploma in civil and structural engineering at the Peninsula Technikon.
Anti-apartheid activism From 1974 to 1981, Manuel worked as a construction technician while maintaining his involvement in civic and anti-apartheid activism. He was initially attracted by the politics of the Black Consciousness Movement, but in 1979 he travelled to Botswana to join the exiled African National Congress (ANC), in his words hoping to become "a revolutionary with a big beard and a big gun". The ANC turned him back to Cape Town, where in 1981 he became a full-time activist as the founding general secretary of the influential Cape Areas Housing Action Committee.
United Democratic Front In 1983, Manuel was a founding member of the Western Cape branch of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a popular front against apartheid. In the same year, he was elected as the UDF's regional secretary and as a member of its national executive committee; he held both positions until 1990. In 1996, Mark Gevisser described him as having been a "solid workhorse of the UDF"; in Gevisser's description: He's the one who, in the rough-and-tumble world of Cape Flats politics, once even punched out current Western Cape Nat MEC Peter Marais at a public meeting; the long-haired biker who used to cruise around in tight Lee jeans, studded shoes and leather jacket. He's the one who used to lead the klaberjas sessions in Victor Verster prison... he was a rough-hewn United Democratic Front street-activist.Because of his political activities, Manuel spent a cumulative 35 months in police detention between 1985 and 1990. He was detained for the first time on 22 October 1985, held under the Internal Security Act, and released a month later under a stringent banning order. On the next occasion, he was held at Victor Verster without trial for almost two years, from August 1986 to July 1988, then rearrested from September 1988 to February 1989. Again released on a banning order, he was arrested once again in August 1989, and held for two months, after he contravened the order by speaking at a press conference in Athlone. Also during this period in 1989, Manuel returned briefly to the private sector as a policy manager for the Mobil Foundation in Cape Town.
African National Congress In February 1990, the apartheid government unbanned the ANC to facilitate negotiations to end apartheid, and Manuel was appointed as the party's deputy coordinator in the Western Cape while legal party structures were established. He was elected as the regional branch's publicity secretary when the first regional party conference was held. However, he was soon promoted: the national ANC held its first conference inside South Africa in Durban in July 1991 and Manuel was elected to the party's top executive organ, the National Executive Committee; by number of votes received, he was ranked 19th of the committee's 50 members, receiving support across 64 per cent of all ballots cast. He was also elected to the ANC National Working Committee.
In the aftermath of the conference, he was recruited full-time to the ANC's headquarters at Shell House, where he was head of the party's nascent department of economic planning. He worked closely with Tito Mboweni, who took responsibility for trade and industrial policy while Manuel focused on fiscal policy. Because of his lack of experience in economics, Manuel's appointment received a dubious reaction from the press, from his friends, and from Manuel himself. Manuel later said that he thought he had been chosen for the department because he was ideologically "agnostic" on questions of policy; in the description of his UDF colleague, Cheryl Carolus, he "had a remarkable ability to listen, to figure out what he needed to achieve, and then to go for it without ideological baggage. He was thorough and conservative, always the voice of reason." In addition, Mark Gevisser considered Manuel a protégé of Thabo Mbeki and noted that Manuel was politically successful in the ANC because he was "one of the few people comfortable in both the ex-UDF nexus around Cyril Ramaphosa – his natural home – and the exile nexus around Mbeki".
He remained the ANC's head of economic planning until the 1994 general election. According to Gevisser, during this period, Manuel "played a critical role in guiding the ANC away from its traditional adherence to centralised planning and towards the market economy it was to espouse".
Minister of Trade and Industry: 1994–1996 In South Africa's first post-apartheid elections in April 1994, Manuel stood as a candidate for the ANC and was elected to the National Assembly, the lower house of the new South African Parliament. He was also appointed as Minister of Trade and Industry in the Government of National Unity under President Nelson Mandela. He said that his priorities would include aligning trade policy and industrial strategy; seizing opportunities "to open up our domestic market to international competition", thus reversing the isolation of the apartheid era; and encouraging long-term investments in human and other capital. He also announced in December 1994 that he would seek to strengthen competition policy to reduce barriers to entry and eliminate monopolistic collusion.
According to observers, his greatest achievement "was to take a department whose sole raison d'être [under apartheid] was to stifle competition, and make it the vanguard of a 'liberalised' market economy", among other things by embracing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and reducing tariffs and other protectionist measures. However, his support for liberalisation made him unpopular with trade unions, including the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union and other members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), the ANC's Tripartite Alliance partner.
During this period, in December 1994, the ANC's 49th National Conference elected Manuel to his second term as a member of the party's National Executive Committee. By number of votes received, he was ranked 17th of the 60 members elected to the committee.
Minister of Finance: 1996–2009
On 28 March 1996, President Mandela announced that Chris Liebenberg had resigned as the Minister of Finance and would be replaced by Manuel, with Gill Marcus as his deputy. He took office on 4 April. Manuel noted that his appointment was "something different" for the business community: describing himself, he acknowledged, "he's young, he's black, he's uppity, he's given other people shit." Despite this uncertain start, he was retained in the ministry in the first and second cabinets of Mandela's successor, President Thabo Mbeki; according to the New York Times, Mbeki's decision to keep him on was "widely applauded by the business community".
Economic policy At the time of his appointment to the ministry, Manuel said that he was a Keynesian and did not believe that "fiscal discipline is an end in itself". However, he later acknowledged that, when he took office in 1996, debt reduction was one of the government's major priorities, as debt servicing costs were the largest budget item. According to Manuel, macroeconomic reforms were the necessary solution, because South Africa wanted to avoid becoming a "client state of anybody" and therefore to avoid heavy borrowing from the Bretton Woods institutions. Soon into his tenure, on 14 June 1996, he announced the government's new Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme, which was viewed as its critics as a marked rightward shift from the Reconstruction and Development Programme; GEAR targeted the reduction of the budget deficit to three per cent, more rapid tariff reductions, constraints on the public sector wage bill, and other so-called market-friendly measures.