If ever there was a man in our public sphere that best captured the changes in South Africa’s economic and political climate over the past 30 years, it is Tito Mboweni, a man who — for better or worse — has helped shape monetary and fiscal policy as part of the three TMs (Thabo Mbeki, Trevor Manuel and Tito Mboweni).
Over the course of two lunches with the “Governor” I, along with my colleague and good friend Phakamisa Ndzamela, witnessed a man shaped by the daring and hope of Nelson Mandela’s first administration become cynical and despondent about the direction the country was going, albeit with a glimmer of hope that things could change for the better.
What he was clear about, though, was that it wasn’t for him to turn the situation around.
As soon as news broke of his untimely passing, I thought of those lunch meetings, the first five years after he had left his hallowed position as the head of the continent’s oldest central bank in 2014 and the second in his “little Idaho” of Tzaneen in Limpopo at the height of the pandemic.
In truth , the lunches were with two different men living different South African stories.
The first meeting took place on a crisp winter morning in Johannesburg at a discreet boutique hotel s currently now a building site behind the McDonald’s outlet on Glenhove Road in Rosebank. It wasn’t my meeting, I was accompanying a then young and bright banking writer in Phakamisa Ndzamela, who was set to write a front-page story of Mboweni’s life after his stint at the Reserve Bank as well as his thoughts on the country five years into the Jacob Zuma administration that had cast him into the cold, politically speaking. Corporate South Africa had provided him with some cover through numerous board positions as a chairman.
The hotel was less than a kilometre from the offices of the old Times Media building, and we were running a bit late as we hurried across, fearing a possible tongue-lashing by the ever irritable former governor.
This impression of him was largely based on what we saw at press conferences where he would lecture about bad consumer spending habits that necessitated a rate hike to deal with inflation. On the televised monetary policy committee press conferences, he always seemed grumpy when economic conditions, namely a fall in inflation, called for a cut in borrowing rates.
He enjoyed the tightening cycle much more, being the inflation targeting evangelist that he was. This to the chagrin of many detractors — not only the trade union movement which wanted a growth mandate, but also well-known economists who argued the Manuel-driven policy would be bad for an emerging market country such as ours in the long run.
Back to our lunch meeting. Fortunately we got to the hotel before the appointed time. In the lobby we were directed to the “Governor’s table”, yes, you read right. However, we were asked to sit elsewhere and wait for his arrival before occupying his designated space.
About 30 minutes later, the “Governor” ambled out of a black luxury wagon. And no, he wasn’t wearing his worn out old brown Clarks shoes that followers of his social media persona in later years knew all too well. Instead, he was clad in a shirt monogrammed “TTM” on the breast pocket and cuff, standing for Tito Titus Mboweni, keeping with the Wall Street or Diagonal Street persona he had embraced during his years at the helm of monetary policy. Diagonal Street was once the home of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. In his lyrical baritone, Mboweni extended warm greetings before inviting us to his table, a marked difference from the more humble dinner tables with pilchards that we’d come to see him share with his 1.5-million followers on X.
As governor, Mboweni, followed a script written by “the greatest central banker who ever lived”, the then US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. Since the last decade of the 20th century when capitalism and democracy had proved the ultimate winners of the Cold War, Greenspan’s tenure between 1987 and 2006 proved to be the playbook in central banking. Before the 2008 global recession, which tarnished his reputation, Greenspan was credited as the man to finally slay the inflationary dragon that burned through the economies of the world’s leading capitals in the 1970s. It’s this mythology that surrounded Mboweni when he first walked into the Pretoria headquarters of the Bank and tried to emulate in his sledgehammer approach to inflationary pressures that had dogged the economy through the final years of apartheid.
It’s arguable today whether this great mythos surrounding Greenspan and his swordsmanship may have been unfounded or at the very least overplayed, as it barely registered the cooling effects of the Chinese factory on the price of imported goods for virtually every economy across the world for three decades.
Be that as it may, central bankers were judged at the turn of the century on how closely they could hold bondholders’ and financial reporters’ attention like Greenspan did — in essence he was what Steve Jobs continues to be to Silicon Valley CEOs today. Mboweni, from what one has read of Greenspan, was a convert to his style. As a result, in Mboweni’s decade-long tenure as governor, he was named central bank governor of the year by financial magazine Euromoney, the ultimate endorsement of his adopted style.
In that first meeting, where both of us would gladly admit to being in awe of one of the TMs, we wondered just how far he had strayed from the school of Greenspan.
Our session started with background introductions and much explaining on why he had to talk to us. We had hooked the Governor by offering him a chance to be on the Financial Mail cover if he had the guts to explain why he was now advocating for a state-owned bank. Before X became his popular choice, the late governor would frequently have outbursts on Facebook calling for the creation of a state bank. It was a marked departure from the free market views he had espoused five years earlier, a clear divergence from Greenspan’s school.
Just before noon, the coffee and the tea had failed to deliver a proper heating up and so the governor summoned the waiter to serve us something hotter from the Scottish Highlands. As we negotiated the beverages, he would often scratch his throat with his voice modulating from baritone to mannerisms similar to that of his pipe-smoking hero from his neighbourhood in Killarney, as he berated the BEE policy for its failure to transform the economy.
What clearly shifted his perspective about the free market was just how preposterous he found that “he” of all people, would struggle to source funding for an iron ore project in his home province of Limpopo. Funding wasn’t forthcoming from any of the big banks that he once regulated over for the project, no matter the personal calls he had made. His hypothesis was that if he couldn’t convince credit committees to back a project, how much more difficult was it for lesser black businessmen to convince nameless credit committees.
This was a decade ago, a time when it was hard for any miner, let alone one operating in a tainted industry that was only just recovering from platinum mining strikes, to get any funding.
In all his frustration in the corner of that discreet hotel restaurant, he seemed human — different from the larger-than-life personality we as young journalists witnessed berate senior financial journalists and other analysts for disrespecting his name, or simply using his name “Tito” in their publications. At his legendary press conferences, where he raised rates with such glee in his cold pursuit of his mandate, orders were barked at photographers about which angles were acceptable. It was pure spectacle.
His frustration on that winter afternoon pointed not only to the lack of his own business acumen, but perhaps more broadly it spoke to an acknowledgment that the transformation, not just racially, of the South African economy was far from complete. This would become more obvious to him years later as he reluctantly returned to public office for a brief three-year stint as the country’s seventh finance minister in a decade to help stave off the country’s ratings downgrade to “junk”, a train no-one could stop.
It’s a frustration that only grew in later years and was even more apparent in my second meeting with the Governor. This time on the rolling hills of Magoebaskloof, his much beloved home. For more than two hours we sat on the veranda of a 120-year-old English home that has since been converted into a hotel. We spoke of the challenges the country was facing as we slowly emerged from the Covid crisis. As finance minister, he lamented the slow pace of structural reforms and the poor political environment that offered little hope of change in the short to medium term, if ever. Gone were any signs of the life he once lived in Gauteng — no Wall Street strut. Instead, he came across as a man now leading a more grounded life with the irritation of a public office. Despite the problems of the world that we were pondering, he was warm, funny and able to laugh at himself and his peers for holding onto political office, very clear in his belief that their time was long over, and it was up to a new generation to lead the country out of the muck.
He was human, fallible. The aloofness and arrogance of his younger self was nowhere to be found. It’s how I think he wanted to be remembered. It’s the only thing that could possibly explain his social media persona in recent years. In that lunch meeting surrounded by the most beautiful views accompanied with Irish whiskey, he spoke of the complexity of the South African condition that no “populist” rhetoric could ever provide an easy solution to.
So, what does one say about a man like Mboweni at the end of his short life? Well, this man of Zulu ancestry whose people ended up settling on acreage offered by King Letsoalo of Tzaneen was a man who ultimately just did his job. He did what the Treasury wanted him to do, both at the central bank and then, ultimately, he became a master of his own destiny by running the Treasury. He essentially protected the Treasury and the central bank from weird policies from both left and right extremes.
• Ron Derby is a former Business Times Editor and Phakamisa Ndzamela is a former Business Day banking writer
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