RIP Tito Mboweni: Memories of a sweet bygone era

In mourning the death of anyone, part of the grief is for what that person represents in terms of a time past – a time which can never happen again. That is why marking the death of Tito Mboweni is more than acknowledging that the man is no more, it is nostalgia for an era we will never see again.

And that era was one when the giants of the ANC seemed to be driven by a belief that they could change South Africa for the better for everyone… and not just for themselves and their money-grubbing accomplices.

The latter is a fairly accurate description of how a once proud and effective liberation movement has lost its way, with its crowning current achievement being the liberation of taxpayer money for themselves.

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Tito Mboweni, the young economist

As a young economist, Mboweni played a pivotal role in crafting the ANC’s people-centric economic policies.

As minister of labour, he piloted through legislation which, although panned by Big Business, tried to level the legal playing field between worker and employer.

Yet, despite shepherding through those populist programmes, Mboweni was anything but a radical socialist, as his time as finance minister and governor of the SA Reserve Bank so eloquently showed.

Mboweni steadied our ‘economic ship’

At the helm of the bank during the global financial crisis of 2008, he helped steady the local economic ship and later, brought the same sort of reliable stability in his decisions as finance minister during the unprecedented Covid pandemic.

Free of corruption

He also remained free of the taint of corruption, retiring a few years ago to his modest farm in the Tzaneen area where he grew up and which he loved.

He made a point of downplaying his own position, often showing up at functions in battered shoes and rumpled suit, mocking his own, pilchard-flavoured cooking endeavours. Will we ever see his like again?

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