Trevor Manuel to receive 8th Honorary Doctorate - Presidency
The Presidency
07 June 2012
Planning minister to be honoured by McMaster University in Canada
*Minister Trevor Manuel to be awarded Honorary Doctorate of Laws by
McMaster University in Canada*
7 Jun 2012
On 14 June Trevor Manuel, Minister of National Planning in the
Presidency of South Africa will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws
by McMaster University in Canada. The McMaster Honorary Doctorate is a
highly selective award bestowed on recipients recognised for their
contributions in public service as well as their influence in national
and international affairs.
Minister Manuel will receive the Doctorate award for his leadership
across the longest period of fiscal discipline, macro-economic stability
and sustained growth in South Africa's history, and his role in charting
the next phase of the country's growth. McMaster is one of the Top 100
universities in the world, and is renowned for its innovation in both
learning and discovery. It has a student population of 23,000, and more
than 156,000 alumni in 140 countries.
***
http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/the-myth-of-manuel-s-wizardry-1.1072429
The myth of Manuel's wizardry
May 23 2011 at 10:28am
By Patrick Bond
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONDUCTING BUSINESS: Minister in the Presidency Trevor Manuel is a
serious contender to take the place of former International Monetary
Fund (IMF) head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Picture: Jeffrey Abrahams
The world's most predatory financial institution had until last Thursday
a managing director nicknamed "The Seducer", who talked left, evoking
John Maynard Keynes, and walked right, imposing austerity on the Third
World, including now Ireland, Greece and Portugal.
Useful though that was to world financial elites, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn's notorious misogyny allowed the powers behind the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ditch him with little hesitation
once rape charges by a vulnerable hotel cleaner last Saturday began to
stick. Raising the prospect of a consensual-sex defence worthy of Jacob
Zuma, superstar lawyer Benjamin Brafman stupidly remarked, "The forensic
evidence, we believe, is not consistent with forcible encounter."
South Africa's Trevor Manuel is apparently being seriously considered as
Strauss-Kahn's replacement, in competition with conservative French
finance minister Christine Lagarde, British political failure Gordon
Brown and other emerging-markets personalities. (A "Europeans Only" sign
always graced the IMF director's door, but surely that can change?)
As the BBC's Richard Quest remarked in a ringing endorsement on Tuesday,
Manuel is the only Third World candidate with the gravitas to confront
the world's leading finance ministers. He chaired the IMF Board of
Governors in 2000, as well as its Development Committee from 2001-05. He
was a member of Tony Blair's 2004-05 Commission for Africa, and chaired
the 2007 G-20 summit.
Manuel was appointed UN Special Envoy for Development Finance in 2008,
headed a 2009 IMF committee that successfully advocated a $750 billion
capital increase, and last year served the UN's High Level Advisory
Group on Climate Change Finance. Even in absentia, Manuel was last month
made co-chair of the UN's huge Green Climate Fund. He argued that up to
half its $100 billion anticipated annual turnover be sourced from
controversial emissions trading, ie "the privatisation of the air".
No one from the Third World has such experience, nor has anyone in these
circuits such a formidable anti-colonial political pedigree, including
several detentions as one of Cape Town's most important anti-apartheid
activists. Yet despite occasional rhetorical attacks on "Washington
Consensus" economic policies, Manuel has been excruciatingly loyal to
the IMF cause.
Even before taking power in 1994, he was considered a World Economic
Forum "Global Leader for Tomorrow", and in 1997 and 2007 Euromoney
magazine named him African Finance Minister of the Year. No wonder, as
in late 1993 he persuaded Nelson Mandela to repay apartheid-era
commercial bank debt against all logic, then negotiated a $850 million
IMF loan that straightjacketed Mandela's presidency.
As trade minister from 1994-96, Manuel liberalised imports, demolishing
the clothing, textile, footwear, appliance and electronics sectors, as
he drove tariffs below what even the World Trade Organisation demanded.
After becoming finance minister in 1996, Manuel imposed the
"non-negotiable" Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy
(co-authored by World Bank staff), which by the time of its 2001 demise
had not achieved a single target aside from inflation.
Manuel also removed exchange controls, cut the primary corporate tax
rate from 48 percent in 1994 to 30 percent five years later, and allowed
the country's biggest corporations to move their financial headquarters
to London, thus ballooning SA's current account deficit.
That in turn required such vast financing inflows that SA's foreign debt
soared from the $25 billion inherited from apartheid to $80 billion 15
years later.
At that stage, with the world economy teetering, The Economist magazine
named SA the most risky of 17 emerging markets, and the government
released data conceding that the country was much more economically
divided than in 1994, overtaking Brazil as the world's most unequal
major country.
"We are not in recession," Manuel quickly declared in February 2009.
"Although it sometimes feels in people's minds that the economy is in
recession, as of now we are looking at positive growth."
In reality, at that very moment the economy was shrinking by a stunning
6.4 percent (annualised), and indeed had been in recession for several
months prior.
More than 1.2 million jobs were lost in the subsequent year.
But in October 2008, just as Strauss-Kahn told the world to try
quick-fix state deficit spending, Manuel sent the opposite message to
his impoverished constituents: "We need to disabuse people of the notion
that we will have a mighty powerful developmental state capable of
planning and creating all manner of employment."
This echoed a 2001 statement to the Sunday Independent: "I want someone
to tell me how the government is going to create jobs. It's a terrible
admission, but governments around the world are impotent when it comes
to creating jobs."
Governments under the neoliberal thumb are also impotent when it comes
to service delivery, and thanks partly to his fiscal squeeze, municipal
state failure resulted in more protests per capita against local
government in Manuel's latter years as finance minister than nearly
anywhere in the world.
Still, remarked Manuel in his miserly 2004 budget speech, "The privilege
we have in a democratic South Africa is that the poor are unbelievably
tolerant".
In 2008, when Patricia DeLille begged that food vouchers be made
available, Manuel replied that there was no way to ensure "vouchers will
be distributed and used for food only, and not to buy alcohol or other
things". He also opposed a Basic Income Grant.
Disgust for poor people extended to Aids medicines, which in December
2001 aligned Manuel with Aids-denialist president Thabo Mbeki in
refusing access: "The little I know about anti-retrovirals is that
unless you maintain a very strict regime... they can pump you full of
anti retrovirals, sadly, all that you're going to do, because you are
erratic, is to develop a series of drug resistant diseases inside your
body."
Instead of delivering sufficient medicines and money to the health
system, schools and municipalities, Manuel promoted privatisation, even
at the 2002 Monterrey global finance summit: "Public-private
partnerships are important win-win tools for governments and the private
sector, as they provide an innovative way of delivering public services
in a cost-effective manner."
In spite of neoliberal ideology's disgrace, Zuma retained Manuel and his
policies when choosing a cabinet in 2009, though rather ironically
sidelined him to a new "planning" ministry without staff.
Five months later, Congress of SA Trade Unions president Sdumo Dlamini
called Manuel the "shop steward of business" because of his "outrageous"
plea to the World Economic Forum's Cape Town summit that capital fight
harder against labour. The National Union of Mineworkers termed Manuel's
challenge "bile, totally irresponsible".
Manuel also disappointed feminists for his persistent failure to keep
budgeting promises.
Former ruling-party politician Pregs Govender helped introduce
gender-budgeting in 1994 but within a decade complained that Manuel
reduced it to a "public relations exercise".
Former ANC member of parliament Andrew Feinstein records that the
finance minister knew of arms-deal bribes solicited by the late defence
minister Joe Modise. Feinstein testified (without challenge) that in
late 2000, Manuel surreptitiously advised him over lunch, "It's possible
there was some shit in the deal. But if there was, no one will ever
uncover it. They're not that stupid. Just let it lie."
Nevertheless, the myth of Manuel's financial wizardry and integrity
continues, in part thanks to a 600-page puff-piece biography, /Choice
not Fate/ (Penguin, 2008) by former spokesperson Pippa Green, a book
subsidised by BHP Billiton, Anglo American, Total Oil and Rand Merchant
Bank.
After all, recent politico-moral and economic scandals by World Bank
presidents Robert Zoellick and Paul Wolfowitz (whom in 2005 Manuel
welcomed to the job as "a wonderful individual... perfectly capable")
confirm that global elites are already scraping the bottom of the
financial leadership barrel.
Yet a candidacy to replace Strauss-Kahn may get Manuel a strong
endorsement from local eco-social justice advocates weary of fighting
him, and losing.
Kick him upstairs, please?
l /Bond is with the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil
Society: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/
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