Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba is, as I write, in New York for an annual meeting with investors, the people who buy our debt every week and enable the government to finance itself.
Gigaba doesn’t have a good story to tell, as we know. He revealed last month that tax collection this year would miss its target by more than R50-billion. By the end of the financial year that number may have grown even further.
Ratings downgrades by Moody’s and S&P on November 24 seem a racing certainty. But Gigaba’s burden is not merely the local economy. It is also his own reputation, which hangs by a thread and which only he can repair.Gigaba may not be a Gupta “servant ” (as the family apparently regarded former Eskomboss Brian Molefe). He is not a Faith Muthambi, a Des van Rooyen, or a Mosebenzi Zwane.
But he is compromised. He should have opposed Zuma’s move to centralise in thepresident ’s office the power to allocate departmental budgets and thus hollow outTreasury’s function. So the investors he talks to in New York know he doesn’t have the clout of his predecessors. His best bet is to organise some sort of disclosure of his relationship with state capture.
It’s a tough one. Politicians are opportunists. You have to wait endlessly for your moment to arrive. Gigaba is still in the game. Could he risk a clear shot at Zuma? Would he survive a Ramaphosa victory for the ANC leadership in December?
I actually think he might, though not in the Treasury. Many other cabinet colleagues would not. Would, for instance, Deputy Public Enterprises Minister Ben Martins survive? I doubt it. He has just shattered an opportunity to stay safe.Eskom ’s former (and courageous) head of legal, Suzanne Daniels, told a parliamentary inquiry this week she had been obliged to attend a meeting last July with Martins, Duduzane Zuma and Ajay Gupta to talk about Molefe’s pension. Martins sarcastically tried to deny he was there and then called a press conference where he was unable to remember quite where he had been on the day.
Then his big mistake. It turns out he knows the Guptas quite well. He said he’d met Tony Gupta when former Prasa CEO Lucky Montana approached him to raise concerns about the Guptas trying to muscle into Prasa.Not true, Montana quickly retorted. The meeting was in late 2012 and he had been invited to Martins’ official residence when he was transport minister, only to discover that Tony Gupta and Duduzane Zuma were there too. Bye-bye reputation.
Maybe there’s a reason politicians can’t tell the truth. There’s a story about Martinsthat by the 2014 general election he was minister of energy. After the vote, the story goes, Zuma invited him to his office and handed him a letter to sign in which he would agree to pursue a nuclear power contract with Russia.
The legend is that Martins refused to sign and was not reappointed. I have asked him about it and he strongly denies the Zuma discussion ever took place. But the rumour enhanced his stature. Now, after this past week, he is suddenly stuck, like Gigaba, with the Gupta stench.
The public has no time for the Guptas anymore and they say the more you explain, themore you lose. But I’ll bet Gigaba would be doing much better..