Trevor Manuel, who was initially made trade and industry minister after democracy in 1994, recalls that there were “all kinds of people” in government departments in those early days, many with doubtful credentials.
One of them was a lawyer who went to Manuel’s office and introduced himself as a former adviser to Adriaan Vlok, the notorious minister of law and order. He claimed Manuel’s release from detention some years before was thanks to his intervention.
Manuel began asking around, and it turned out the lawyer had been struck from the roll after he overcharged Vlok’s department and had been quietly smuggled into the department of trade and industry in another position.
He interpreted the lawyer’s claim – that he had helped release him from prison – as a shot across the bow. “If you’re asking about hostility …,” he says.
Manuel offers a contextual explanation for what became known as cadre deployment – a party policy he later criticised.
“Just before we got into government, the deficit was 8.3% in 1992, 1993, so you’re not starting on zero. The South African Reserve Bank [SARB] had also built up a net open forward position in trying to defend the rand with $47bn, so the reserves at the SARB had a minus sign in front and that had to be worked up – not down, up – to zero,” he says.
At the time, tax receipts were incredibly low because the tax administration was very poor, he says, while government was paying immense amounts of interest to borrow money.
“There was no foreign borrowing, government could only borrow locally. There was the prescribed asset requirement, with every pension fund in the country required to put their money into government. So, it was quite a terrible situation in respect of public finances,” he says.
The incoming government had to immediately make sweeping and urgent interventions, he says, not only to give effect to the ANC’s election promises and fundamentally reorganise society but to prevent the country’s finances from deteriorating further.
And Manuel argues this could not be done with some of the senior staff still in place at former apartheid government departments. Key executive positions had to be filled with officials and bureaucrats who were supportive of a new government, and receptive to new policies.
The new ANC people entering the department of finance – people like Maria Ramos and Andrew Donaldson – assembled on the 19th floor of the building on Proes Street in Pretoria. “It was known as the ANC floor,” says Manuel.
But his recollections also reveal that, despite the initial tension and distrust that followed the change of government, he did not experience major incidents of subversion or overt hostility. It must, however, be said that Manuel is particularly combative and has, over the course of his career, rarely entertained resistance.
His first few days as minister of trade and industry illustrate this. Manuel describes how the director-general had left about a year before the election, since he didn’t want to be part of the democratic order.
“There was an acting DG, oom Gerrie Breyl, who … was a mild-mannered chap. I got there and there was no computer in the minister’s office. The only thing I remember was a pink chaise longue, a couch for the minister,” he says.
“I called the manager and said, ‘What is this?’ They said, ‘No, ministers rest in the afternoons.’ I said, ‘Okay, but I haven’t come here to rest, you know, I’ve come here to work and I need a computer,’ and so on. And they were very shocked, because none of the men who were seniors in the department were computer literate. There were secretaries to do that stuff.”
Manuel was no computer whiz, but this was a cultural shift as much as anything.
For a start, he introduced a system of regular meetings. And he brought in a transition team, including Alistair Ruiters, who came in as an adviser, but would later become director-general; Alan Hirsch, who is now a professor; and Mfundo Nkuhlu, who is now the chief operating officer at Nedbank. “It was an all-male team; I apologise for that,” he says.
At the time, the head of human resources in the ministry was someone with the surname Breytenbach.
“Breytenbach said, ‘Minister, you can’t do this. You must put it out to tender,’ and … I said, ‘No, there’s a change of government, a fundamentally important change of government and I need to bring in some people.’ And he said, ‘No, I can’t allow it.’ And I said, ‘Yes, you will allow it.’ And so eventually, you know, ministers get their way, and Breytenbach left,” he says.
Manuel’s biggest run-in was with Estian Calitz, the director-general at the department of finance. Calitz was appointed deputy director-general in 1989 and elevated to director-general in October 1993.
On February 26 1996, Chris Liebenberg, President Nelson Mandela’s finance minister, told Calitz that Mandela would be announcing a new finance minister. When Calitz asked who the replacement would be, Liebenberg told him it would be Manuel.
Calitz said in that case, he’d leave — “I can’t work with him”, Manuel recalls.
Manuel describes how, when he first walked into the finance ministry in Proes Street, the wall in the reception area carried photographs of South Africa’s finance ministers — from Klasie Havenga in 1929, through to Barend du Plessis, the last finance minister of the apartheid era.
“I said, ‘But Estian, those photos must come down.’ And he said, ‘No, that’s our history.’ And I said, ‘Estian, that might be your history but I don’t think it’s our history.’ I said: ‘You didn’t even have the decency to put up the photographs of Derek Keys and Chris Liebenberg. You stopped with Barend. There’s a message. I’m asking you to take that down,’” he says.
Calitz refused, arguing that the auditor-general would take issue with him — but Manuel said he’d explain to the auditor-general why those photographs had to come down.
Manuel told him: “Why don’t you take them with you because you’re going? You can pack them into your trommel, you can hang them in your study. It’s your personal history and you can have it.”
The argument, as Manuel tells it, is that the new democratic dispensation couldn’t be built unless the “attitude of people who were very senior in the public service” changed.
Tim du Plessis, who as a politics reporter in the 1980s and 1990s got to know the National Party establishment well, has a different perspective on the civil service at the time. He argued that many senior bureaucrats were welcoming of the new order.
“There were many people in those institutions of state who were well disposed to what was happening. Someone like Niël Barnard [head of the National Intelligence Service] became very friendly with Mandela and it turned out that they became relatively close, for example,” he said.
Du Plessis also cites Fanie van der Merwe as the quintessential example of “the good bureaucrat”. Van der Merwe was the constitutional adviser to FW de Klerk’s government during the negotiations, served on the secretariat at Codesa and the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum, and helped establish the Transitional Executive Council ahead of the 1994 elections.
After the elections, Van der Merwe helped draft the country’s electoral laws and remained a commissioner of the Independent Electoral Commission until 2011.
“Van der Merwe maintained his independence as a bureaucrat,” said Du Plessis. He was considered an elder statesman with enormous stature, never smothering dissent, but working to convince others not to get up to mischief.
“And then there was the symbolism of General Georg Meiring, the head of the apartheid South African Defence Force [SADF], saluting Mandela as the air force jets roared above at the inauguration in Pretoria. And that also sent a message to public servants,” he said.
Du Plessis said there are obviously others who were negative about the transition, but they eventually left or were shifted out. “But unfortunately, the new government also got rid of a large cohort of civil servants who understood the system and could have made a big contribution in the early years,” he said.
The National Party had inherited its civil service culture from the British, and the unofficial motto remained: “We serve all governments with equal loyalty and equal contempt.”
“After 1948, with the victory of the Nationalists, they did get rid of English speakers, mainly in the defence force, but there weren’t major purges in the civil service. As the English bureaucrats’ periods of service ended, they were just replaced,” he said.
Du Plessis said he was never aware of mid-level resistance to the new order after 1994. “But maybe there was,” he said.
Pieter du Toit is assistant editor at News24 where he oversees the investigative team. He is the author of ‘The Stellenbosch Mafia’ (2019) and ‘The ANC Billionaires’ (2022). ‘The Super Cadres’ was released in September by Jonathan Ball Publishers and has reached the number one position on Nielsen BookScan’s chart.