JUSTICE MALALA | SA and its people are the poorer for Pravin Gordhan’s passing

There will be much reminiscing and arguing about Pravin Gordhan, the former finance and public enterprises minister who died on Thursday.

There is already rejoicing from those who sought to vilify him and paint him as corrupt to hide their own malfeasance. There is Schadenfreude from those he stopped stealing from the fiscus and from undermining the institutions of accountability of our country. Predictably, from the flip-floppers of the EFF who once said they would choose this man of integrity over Jacob Zuma, there is already an unseemly, undignified, dance over his grave.

That is OK. No amount of rejoicing over Gordhan’s death will erase the evidence of his work and the truth of his life. He was a selfless man. He was a man of integrity. Most of all, courage was his name. At his best he is an example for anyone who wants to enter public affairs in this country or elsewhere. Our country and our people are poorer for his death.

Don’t get me wrong. He was far from perfect. He was stubborn. He was obsessed with being right, even when he was not. He was blind to the idea of sometimes taking a roundabout route, a gentler route, to achieving his goals. We can talk about his major failures, particularly in his last portfolio at the public enterprises ministry, and his arrogant dealings with MPs (who are ultimately his bosses and representatives of the people he claimed to serve) over his attempts to withhold information on the SAA deal. It was the lowest point of a career full of honourable achievements.

The job of fixing our state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been made extremely difficult given we have a president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who has been tentative at best and indecisive at worst, and a governing party that is still equally divided between the looters and the reformers. Turning around Eskom, Transnet, Denel, SAA and the many other SOEs in trouble was never going to be easy. Trying to do it by micromanaging, as Gordhan was alleged to have done, was doomed to end in disaster.

Yet, in these times of half-truths, let us be reminded it was Gordhan who appointed the incredible Mteto Nyathi to lead the board of Eskom. That board brought on Dan Marokane as CEO, and today we are not blighted by load-shedding. The Transnet turnaround story is also proceeding apace. From the long period of darkness we can now see light at the end of the tunnel for these entities. It would be dishonest to absolve Gordhan of the failure to move faster in fixing them, but it would be more dishonest not to give him credit for helping bring about the turnaround we are seeing.

We are lucky to be producing so many historians of stature in our country and I hope in time there will be a plethora of histories of the country over the past 50 years for us to choose from and read.

Those histories will show in the 1970s and 1980s it was the truly brave who stood up against apartheid. Gordhan, a qualified pharmacist, could have chosen to keep his head down, make himself a bit of money, build up a nest egg and continue with a comfortable life. He chose instead to fight against apartheid. Only a few — and here I do not mean the members of parties such as the MK Party who talk about war only now, in peace time — fought against apartheid actively. Gordhan did.

In the 2000s he led the South African Revenue Service from one success to the next. It was in the mid-2010s, when he started realising the depth of the damage his comrade and president of his ANC was doing to the country by handing its wealth and its leadership to the Gupta family, that he found his courage again. With some brave whistle-blowers, and alongside the likes of his deputy at the finance ministry Mcebisi Jonas, Gordhan used his voice to help mobilise the fight back against state capture.

This is when many of us saw the best of this man. In mobilising civil society voices to stop state capture he was humble yet driven, quiet but effective, under pressure yet able to get up in the morning and fight for state capture to be stopped. He was what we all should be: vigilant, patriotic, committed, straight as an arrow.

When the moment to be brave came, Gordhan responded with a clear, loud and positive response. When our country was in peril, he stepped up.

Go well, Pravin Gordhan. Those who vilify you today know your courage and moral compass made you unbreakable. Insimbi ayigobi — this pillar of steel did not bend.