FOR a decade, everyone knew the drill on the Thursday afternoon that the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) was to announce its decision on interest rates.
Tito Mboweni would stroll into the room, armed with a mischievous grin. Financial markets would be on the edge of their seats – and he knew it. This was his show. The Governor, as he insisted on being known, would teach, preach, engage – and entertain – his captive audience.
Mboweni, executives recall, could defuse the worst tensions with a well-timed joke, or announce a steep rate hike with a smile. For others, the memory is of the social media “chef” who made canned pilchards famous, amusing his X acolytes with his love of garlic and photos of himself sweating from too many chillies.
Having had type 2 diabetes, he died at Mediclinic Sandton Hospital in Bryanston on Saturday after returning from a trip to Ghana, according to a family friend. He was 65. Mboweni, who had been married and separated from his long-term partner, is survived by his three sons, Tumelo, Pule and Baptzi, the person said, declining to be identified as they are not a spokesperson for the family.
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“It was devastating,” Maria Ramos, a close friend of Mboweni since meeting him in the late 1980s, told Currency. Ramos and her partner, former finance minister Trevor Manuel, had returned from dinner in Cape Town on Saturday when they were told the news. “He left an indelible mark on our country.”
Ramos and Manuel opened their home to Mboweni and his family when they returned from exile in 1990. Both would work closely with Mboweni: Manuel as South Africa’s first black finance minister, its longest serving (between 1996 and 2009), and arguably its most successful; Ramos as director-general in the National Treasury from 1996 to 2003 and, later, in the private sector.
“Tito was just one of those incredibly warm, engaging people who could reach out to others,” Ramos said. “He was always open to ideas, he challenged, he listened, he wasn’t somebody who just conformed. He was always searching for new ways to do things.”
Mboweni treated friendships and work with the same level of mutual respect. “You just know when the chips are down, there is someone you can count on,” she said.
Time for the elephants to go washing
Born in Tzaneen in Limpopo, Mboweni’s early involvement in political activism led him to abandon his BCom degree and flee into exile in Lesotho in 1980 and join the ANC. While in Lesotho, he earned a BA (honours) in political science and economics, before moving to England in 1987 to complete his master’s in development economics.
Yet Mboweni’s role in shaping South Africa’s economy of today is often overlooked.
As the deputy head of the ANC’s economic policy committee, under Manuel, he played a pivotal role in shaping the party’s “Ready to Govern” document released in 1992, which outlined its vision for South Africa’s democratic future. The constitution’s provisions outlining central bank independence also relied on Mboweni’s input. Ramos was among those who contributed to economic policy.
In 1994, Mboweni was appointed labour minister under then president Nelson Mandela, introducing laws that many businesses criticise for being too protective of workers’ rights. They gave them the right to strike, collective bargaining, and the establishment of labour courts that made it difficult to fire underperforming employees.
In 1998, Mandela moved Mboweni to the SARB, where he spent a year under Chris Stals before taking the top job, becoming the first black governor of the Reserve Bank.
At his inauguration, Mboweni immediately laid down his marker as an orthodox central banker, emphasising there would be no “cheap money” to artificially stimulate the economy. He highlighted that South Africa must see itself “as citizens of the global village” and that: “Sweswi hi ngene eka nkari wa mahlambandlopfu (we are now entering the time of the day when the elephants go washing; that is, the crack of dawn).”
Despite the raw memories of apartheid, he paid tribute to Stals as a “truly new Voortrekker who did not shy away from contributing his best to the new South Africa”.
What he didn’t say was that the apartheid-era officials had left him with an almighty mess. Shortly before he’d joined, when the rand blew out in 1996 and 1998, the SARB tried in vain to defend the value of the rand by buying foreign currency and taking out forex contracts.
Mboweni not only had to close those contracts, but also rebuild the foreign exchange reserves – all at a time when many of the experienced hands chose to leave the SARB, many evidently not comfortable with a black governor.
But when the currency plunged in 2001, Mboweni didn’t make the same mistake. His adoption of inflation-targeting as the SARB’s mandate, and the prudent fiscal management policies adopted by Manuel, built policy credibility and ensured that the rand recovered over subsequent years.
Evolution of a banker
It wasn’t long after becoming governor that Mboweni developed his cigar habit.
Ramos found the development ironic since he had been a “militant nonsmoker” during his days in exile – unlike Manuel, whom Mboweni used to jibe back then for his smoking habits.
That was just one of his many quirks, even if it got him banned from smoking cigars in Ramos’s house during his many visits.
After he left the Reserve Bank in 2009, he joined the private sector as an adviser to Goldman Sachs and as chair of several companies, notably AngloGold Ashanti.
But the views he held as labour minister evolved once he was in the private sector; Mboweni once quipped, only half in jest, to this journalist, that he sees the labour laws very differently from the other side.
Ramos points out that the context in the early 1990s when Mboweni first became labour minister, was very different from today; back then, it was a country emerging from apartheid, where memories of the exploitation of workers were still fresh.
Labour unions, which initially had seen Mboweni as a saviour, would later grow sharply critical of what they saw as his slide into conservative economic policy.
Zwelinzima Vavi, who was then general secretary of Cosatu, South Africa’s largest labour federation, said even though he introduced positive changes to the labour law, there was a “Tito Mboweni we had fundamental disagreements with”.
Once Mboweni became SARB governor, the unions objected to his use of interest rate hikes to tame inflation, believing this burdened families with higher costs, stymied growth and curbed job creation. Later, when he was finance minister, they protested against his austerity budget and his view that people should pay for e-tolls.
Still, Mboweni would spend hours with unions, trying to convince them that inflation targeting would protect the most vulnerable against accelerating prices. He didn’t “run away” and understood “we have different opinions”, Vavi said.
Manuel credits Mboweni for his contribution in helping to establish the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a socioeconomic policy introduced after 1994, as well as the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac), a body set up to facilitate talks between the government, business, labour and civil society.
Operation Vulindlela, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s signature plan to fast-track economic reforms by removing structural blockages, was another on which Mboweni worked closely during his stint as finance minister, from 2018 to 2021.
Mboweni had a “passion for the African continent”, Manuel told SABC News, and he was part of a panel, chaired by Rwandan President Paul Kagame, aimed at reforming the African Union.
Kagame this weekend paid tribute to Mboweni, saying he had “dedicated his energy to implementing the reform as chair of the AU Peace Fund. His legacy will live on for generations to come.”
Reflecting on Mboweni as a friend, Manuel said: “Tito’s humour was the stuff of legend. Whether this comes from stories from exile about how useless he was going to be as a guerilla. He was much better as an economist.”
An accidental minister
Mboweni’s last stint in government, as finance minister, was somewhat accidental.
At the time, he’d wanted rather to explore academia, being named an honorary professor at the School of Business Sciences at Wits University. But Ramaphosa had other plans, calling on him as one of the very few with the stature to help clean up after the corruption-ridden years of Jacob Zuma.
Even then, Mboweni tackled the job with vigour. “He rose to the task,” especially when Covid-19 hit in 2020, the Treasury’s deputy director-general Ismail Momoniat told eNCA. “He was a disruptor. He understood the economics and how to get the economy to grow.”
Mboweni wasn’t afraid to court controversy, including openly disagreeing with the ANC, which had lobbied hard for the nationalisation of the SARB.
Officials at the Treasury would live in fear of the social media posts they would wake up to and “what damage control” they would have to do, Momoniat said.
Mboweni lived an open life on social media: Frequent posts of his cooking, selfies after church, his 28-year-old shoes or photos of marijuana on his farm, where he anointed himself the “Duke of the Duchy of Magoebaskloof”, spoke of an atypical central banker.
But those beaten-up shoes and old leather jackets betrayed some of Mboweni’s finer indulgences, including red wine and whisky – fancies he’d curbed in the last few months of his life to focus on his health.
Among them are Oban, a single malt from one of Scotland’s oldest distillers, and cigars ranging from Partagas, a Cuban brand, to Hoyo De Monterrey to Cohiba.
Nor was Mboweni afraid to laugh at himself.
After he signed the country’s bank notes in 1999, Cassper Nyovest released a song in 2017 with the lyrics Tito Mboweni Sha Sha. The video showed the rapper and dancers waving wads of cash around sports cars, private jets and fancy apartments, with Mboweni’s name used repeatedly, a clear metaphor for this flash.
Famously, this made Mboweni probably the first central banker to have had a chart-topping rap song written about them.
At the time, Mboweni joked that Nyovest owed him royalties, and asked Julius Malema, head of the opposition EFF, over X, to negotiate a deal. Soon, the track was pumping through nightclubs, shebeens and radio stations.
His quirks were many. He would host black-tie dinners at the central bank and invite bankers, journalists, economists and staff from the Treasury – and some of those who didn’t pitch would be called up and questioned.
Reporters attending monetary policy committee press conferences were expected to wear ties and jackets and even after he left the SARB, he still preferred to be called “Governor”. At one stage, he banned photographers because one had taken an unflattering picture of him wiping sweat from his brow under the searing lights.
As Ramos puts it: “Some people work hard at being eccentric. Tito didn’t have to work that hard.”
What he did work hard at, however, was building South Africa’s economic policy. And on this score, while he may be gone, his fingerprints will linger for decades.
♦ VWB ♦
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