On Sunday morning, former president Jacob Zuma appeared to find something on Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s Twitter timeline that he agreed with – so much so that he retweeted it.
He is not yet known for being extremely active on Twitter, and he has never before retweeted anyone.
The tweet from Mboweni was made long before he’d had any idea he was to be the next finance minister, and it came in the form of a prayer: “‘Dear God, open the eyes and ears of our Leaders’. Let them do four things: The State must own 40% of mining companies, start a State Bank, implement appropriate Land Use Planning and Create a Sovereign Wealth Fund. What is so difficult? That is Radical Economic Transformation!!”
When Mboweni accepted the role of finance minister in October following the shock resignation of Nhlanhla Nene, the DA in particular was critical of this tweet and others like it from earlier in the year in April. They demanded clarity on whether Mboweni would be pursuing a socialist-nationalising approach that has now been associated with the so-called Zuma camp in the ANC.
At the time, Mboweni was also criticised for tweeting ideas that seemed as though they were right out of the EFF’s policy manifesto playbook.
His series of tweets about a call for the greater socialisation of capital had trended at the time.
Mboweni also explained that, to his mind, appropriate land use planning would involve demarcating land clearly for “housing, agriculture, grazing, forestry, tourism, leisure, schooling, hospitals, etc. Now, before people do their own will.” He added that the most urgent task in this respect would be to “allocate land immediately for residential purposes. Urgent. Really URGENT!!”
It’s not certain why Zuma would now choose to retweet Mboweni, though it was obvious enough that a message was being sent.
Zuma’s Mboweni retweet.
