Farewell, Gov

I never met Tito Mboweni the freedom fighter. I never met Mboweni the labour minister or the Reserve Bank governor. But I had several encounters with Mboweni the finance minister at his mountain hideout in Limpopo, and those interactions remain some of the best I’ve had in a journalism career spanning more than two decades.

The man was not perfect but he was one of the sharpest economic minds to ever come out of our turbulent transition to democracy. We never knew how lucky we were.

Getting Mboweni to open up to me wasn’t easy. It took some persuasion for him to even agree to meet. When I suggested his Pretoria office or a restaurant somewhere in Joburg, he replied: “I’m in Magoebaskloof, you have to come here.”

A few days later, on a Friday afternoon, I was on the N1 highway making the 400km trip up north. “Book yourself at the Magoebaskloof Hotel,” he suggested.

Though uneasy about the rustic appearance of the hotel, I booked a room for two nights and prepared for my engagement with the finance minister, former Reserve Bank governor and ANC veteran. “The Gov” was the title he loved, and I referred to him as such.

The next morning, we met for breakfast at the airy Mountain Café, one of his favourites. I wrote in September 2020 that it was easy to see why the man loved the mountain surroundings and lush greenery of Magoebaskloof so much. He had moved there permanently from around 2017, but commuted regularly to Gauteng and other provinces for work and business.

“It reminds me of the English countryside. We had a house in Derbyshire,” he fondly remarked of the home belonging to an English family that took him in as a youngster when he went into exile in the mid-’80s. He told me that after returning from exile he tried resettling in his hometown of Tzaneen — 30km from Magoebaskloof — but found it too humid. It prompted him to settle for the cooler climate of the kloof with its subtropical evergreen forests.

He was madly in love with the place and an enthusiastic tour guide. He would suggest you try the outdoor and indoor activities offered — fly-fishing, zip lining... the works. He spoke highly of its agricultural prowess, and how its farms were major exporters of avocados and macadamia nuts to Europe and other parts of the world.

Bridget Hilton-Barber, an ex-travel writer who later settled in the mountains of Agatha outside Tzaneen to run Kings Walden, the family’s boutique hotel, wrote of their two-decades long friendship and mutual love for the area: “Over the past two decades, we lunched at the Coach House Hotel, at the Magoebaskloof Hotel, the Iron Crown Pub, Magoebaskloof Mountain Lodge, Fairview Hotel, at Kings Walden. Once or twice, we lunched in Jozi and spent half the meal talking about how much we missed our mountains,” she wrote.

Besides being stubborn as a mule, The Gov was set in his beliefs — and would hardly yield to an opposing viewpoint. 

“Our lunches distilled into the following ritual: a double Johnnie Walker Black each before the meal. Then, to go with it, ‘a bottle of white monopoly capital’, his nickname for the Rupert & Rothschild cabernet sauvignon. The Gov loved living in Magoebaskloof and fast became the darling of the village of Haenertsburg, the centre of the district. He ate at local places — often alone. He supported local businesses, he greeted the villagers warmly, he took it on himself to try to reform the old-school Rotary Club. Even the local village bottle store took to stocking bottles of white monopoly capital.”

Naturally, taking a meeting in public with the village’s most famous resident meant I had to grin and bear the constant interruptions from admirers intruding on our breakfast chat. This was shortly after the first hard Covid-19 lockdown was partially lifted late in 2020 but with stringent regulations enforcing the wearing of face masks, keeping safe distance from each other and sanitising regularly. The Gov was steadfast in abiding by the regulations and insisted on keeping his mask on for impromptu photoshoots.

The owner and staff at Mountain Café gave him the celebrity treatment. On our first meeting, he wore banana-coloured chinos, a navy checked jacket over a T-shirt, a baseball cap and the brown leather veldskoene he got mercilessly mocked for on Twitter (now X), the social media platform he enthusiastically took to. He still has 1.5-million followers on the site.

Mboweni spent evenings entertaining followers with his ghastly late-night culinary skills consisting mainly of tinned pilchards, big chunks of raw tomatoes, huge cloves of garlic, and roasted chicken that always emerged out of the oven looking like it had been mercilessly tortured and hung on a string. But that was his lighter side, and he insisted on South Africans getting a behind-the-scenes look, an unfiltered view, so they could experience the real Tito instead of the minister of finance.

He told me at the time that National Treasury communicators pleaded to be allowed to manage the account on his behalf and he always rebuffed them. “I will never surrender my Twitter account to government officials.” He never did.

Besides being stubborn as a mule, The Gov was set in his beliefs — political, economic and otherwise — and would hardly yield to an opposing viewpoint. He was more likely to offer a free lecture on why your observations and opinions were wrong if they differed from his.

And why wouldn’t he? The man literally wrote the rule book on South Africa’s inflation targeting policy, which has become the anchor of monetary policy. He was co-architect of core ANC economic policies pre- and post-disbandment, that would later morph into the highly successful economic programme of its post-apartheid administration, catapulting the country to near 6% growth before the 2008 global economic meltdown and state capture put an end to this prosperity.

As labour minister, he oversaw the introduction and implementation of some of the most progressive labour laws in the world. As finance minister he conceptualised Operation Vulindlela — a joint initiative between the Presidency and Treasury that has removed most of the red tape blocking key economic reforms. Those guys literally go over the heads of lethargic bureaucrats to get projects approved and off the ground.

One of the tragedies of the post-liberation ANC has been the decline in the intellectual rigour and moral rectitude of the cadre of the Mandela/Mbeki era vs the modern-day deployee. How can the party that produced Tito Mboweni be the same one deploying to parliament people who can hardly string two sentences together? But lest we forget, this is the same party that catapulted Jacob Zuma straight from the dock into the Union Buildings.

Mboweni was fiercely loyal to the ANC. He insisted the party could not be put on trial for the sins of individuals. The ANC was in a state of dysfunction because it was infiltrated by those who were alien to its principles, he proffered when we later met for dinner at the Magoebaskloof Hotel restaurant — another one of his favourites

He had instructed me to be there at 7pm sharp. I found a seat 10 minutes before and fiddled with my phone. Half an hour later, he still hadn’t showed up. I ordered something to drink and sent him a WhatsApp message asking if we were still on for dinner. No response. I ordered another drink; something stronger this time. An hour later, disappointed, I retreated back to the hotel room. Just as I was settling in, The Gov called. His other meetings overran our appointment, could we meet in 15 minutes, same spot?

The mistake the ANC made, he elaborated after ordering a glass of “white monopoly capital”, was to open up its membership to all after the unbanning. This attracted characters who didn’t have its interests or those of South Africa at heart. Straight out of the Thabo Mbeki school of politics, he also believed fewer was better. “The people that are looting are not my comrades. When you open up to 1-million members, you do not even know who these people are. Better few but better.”

I laughed out loud when he said the party was capable of self-correction.  And I decided to push the envelope further.

The conversation switched to his then role as holder of the purse strings, and whether he was still keen on continuing in that role. He was due to deliver the medium-term budget policy statement before parliament a few weeks from our date. What he didn’t know was that some frustrated senior Treasury officials had confided in me about how difficult he was to work with. They decried how he insisted on running things from Magoebaskloof, and how his day would often begin after lunchtime. It meant most times they’d have to work late into the night to keep up with his irregular working hours.

Yes, he would drive to Pretoria or fly to Cape Town for crucial meetings, but whenever he felt like it, he would summon them up to the mountain. On one of my numerous treks up the mountain, I bumped into several senior officials early on a Saturday morning heading to a meeting with him. But I had heard of ministers treating officials even worse, so I gave him a pass on this one.

What I did push him on was whether he was happy to continue in the role. He gave me a political answer, something about being happy to continue as long as President Cyril Ramaphosa still wanted him to. I refused to back down and he finally relented, admitting he didn’t want the job in the first place, and only took it as a favour to the president. “Of course, I didn’t want this job, I didn’t. I just accepted it, but I didn’t want this job. I didn’t say I was unhappy, but I didn’t want this job.”

It was this specific comment that would place me at the receiving end of an unhappy telephone call from The Gov a few days after it was published. “You got me into trouble with the president,” he barked.

“How?” I enquired.

The insinuation from the direct quote made him out to be an ill-disciplined and arrogant ANC member who thought he could choose where to be deployed, he explained in frustration. I protested my innocence. It was not done not out of malice, but there was no way I could have omitted such a salient quote from the article.

In fact, on the day the feature was published, I fielded calls from some of his comrades, and from several government officials, all asking the same question: “Did he really say that?” They were in disbelief.

I wasn’t at all surprised. This was The Gov they were talking about. He wasn’t just a maverick — he was the real deal. The cliché “larger than life” has been wasted on many who don’t deserve such an accolade. He was the genuine the larger-than-life personality.

Ramaphosa was lucky Mboweni agreed to step in when Nhlanhla Nene was forced to resign in disgrace in 2108. After giving so much to the people of this country, those three years in office were his final act of kindness. He could have refused and continued to live a quiet and private life surrounded by tranquillity and nature.

Man, we never knew how lucky we were!

Our relationship soured a bit after the article, but he later softened and agreed to a subsequent engagement at Kings Walden. Though we kept in contact occasionally, I hadn’t spoken to him for over a year when the ANC lost the elections in May. What I would give now to hear his honest thoughts out loud.