After Nelson Mandela was released from prison by South Africa’s apartheid government in 1990, he needed someone to take on the critical role of negotiating with business leaders. The task involved walking a tightrope between frightening them into capital flight and democratising an economy whose ownership was concentrated into a handful of conglomerates, dominated by the gold and diamond miners, almost all of whom were white. It went to Tito Mboweni, who has died aged 65 following a short illness, and he came to have a key influence on the country’s development.
In the transition period to 1994, when the African National Congress came to power in the first multiracial general election, the party was divided between the centre and the left, with the latter calling for the nationalisation of mines and banks. Mandela had to intervene, urging pragmatism, and Mboweni used the threat of nationalisation as leverage over both the apartheid-era National party, led by FW de Klerk as president, and the heads of big business.
In 1992, Mandela was invited to address global corporate leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Late in the day, it was discovered that his speech, written by a supporter of the left, had committed South Africa to nationalisation. Mboweni hastily rewrote the offending paragraphs, fudging the nationalisation question. Newspapers in South Africa, having been provided with the earlier version, splashed with the nationalisation pledge, but Mandela could – fortunately for the tortuous negotiations then being conducted between the outgoing regime and incoming one – plausibly deny it.
When the ANC formed a government in 1994, Mandela appointed Mboweni, still only 35, as his minister of labour. Mboweni went on to transform labour relations from the master-servant model under apartheid with a new framework that included the right to strike and belong to a union of choice, as well as collective bargaining and a dispute resolution mechanism. Working closely with the International Labour Organization, he regulated conditions of employment in the workplace.
In 1999, Mboweni was appointed the first black governor of the Reserve Bank. He negotiated the country through a difficult period, which included rampant inflation and a sudden dramatic devaluation of the currency. Instituting an inflation-targeting regime, he successfully aimed for a range of 3-6%, and restored the credibility of the rand. In 2008, he had to deal with the fallout of the global economic downturn, which hit emerging countries such as South Africa particularly hard.
After 10 years, he left for the private sector, notably as an adviser to the investment bank Goldman Sachs, and on his farm in Magoebaskloof, Limpopo, he cultivated avocados. But it was not to last. In 2018, when Cyril Ramaphosa became president, he asked Mboweni to join his cabinet as minister of finance to repair the damage wrought by Jacob Zuma’s kleptocratic rule. The country’s coffers had been plundered and financial institutions painstakingly built up in the early post-apartheid years had been hollowed out.
The state-owned enterprises such as the electricity provider, Eskom, required massive bailouts to continue to keep the lights on. And then Covid struck, plunging the government further into debt.
It was Mboweni’s toughest job yet. He instituted a ruthless programme of austerity, which made him unpopular with large segments of the ANC. But, independent as ever – he had no personal political ambitions to hold him back – he managed to get the country’s finances back on track. He stepped down in 2021, took up various private sector directorships, and the following year was back as anadviser to Goldman Sachs.
Born in the village of Bordeaux, near Tzaneen in the north-eastern province of Limpopo (then Transvaal), Tito was the youngest of three sons of Peggy and Nelson Mboweni. In 1980, two years into a BA degree at the University of the North (later the University of Limpopo), which was then an incubator of black activist intellectuals, he left South Africa to join the banned ANC. In 1985, he gained a BA in economics and political science from the National University of Lesotho and, in 1988, an MA in developmental economics from the University of East Anglia.
Even after he attained his lofty institutional position, he remained an activist at heart, constantly innovating. He took the Reserve Bank to the people, holding, for the first time in its history, meetings all over the country where ordinary South Africans could engage with bank officials. In later years he became a keen food blogger, with 1.5 million followers, though his penchant for tinned pilchards brought him teasing from some of them.
His marriage to his wife, Mamokotlana, ended in divorce. He is survived by his sons, Tumelo, Pule and Nkateko.
• Tito Titus Mboweni, politician, born 16 March 1959; died 12 October 2024
