The age of Jacob Zuma (profiled here by my friend Doug Foster in an excellent piece in The Atlantic) officially kicked off earlier this month. Not surprisingly, Zuma only retained nine of his predecessor Thabo Mbeki’s Cabinet (the Cabinet of interim President Kgalema Montlanthe was merely a stop-gap until Zuma put his own stamp down).
Everybody was watching to see whether he would keep or replace Mbeki’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel, associated with the conservative economic policies adopted by the government since 1996 (policies that were good for the market, but bad for the country’s poor majority).
In the end, Zuma appointed a new finance minister, Pravin Gordhan (full disclosure: I like Gordhan, who served on the board of my last employer in South Africa), who reformed the country’s tax service. But Zuma also did something else: he promoted Manuel to a new post: as minister in the presidency of a powerful new department, the national planning commission, which will coordinate government policy.
The long and the short of it: Trevor Manuel is still the most powerful man in South Africa’s government.
Among those who are happy, predictably, is The Economist.
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