Word: africa
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...news? The big news is that Trevor Manuel, finance minister since 1996, stays - but in a new role, as head of a new planning commission which will act as watchdog and overseer of all government departments. This is good. Manuel is widely respected inside and outside South Africa and is credited as the man who created the conditions, before the global downturn, for South Africa's economy to grow by close to 5% a year. Manuel has long complained that while he built government resources, other departments squandered them. Fifteen years since the end of apartheid, the big questions facing...
...replaces Manuel at Finance? Pravin Gordhan, former head of South Africa's tax authority. This is more good news. Tax compliance has long been a problem in South Africa. But Gordhan has got more people to pay more tax, raising the tax base by around 10% every year since he was appointed in 1999. He is respected by the markets and his appointment should go some way to reassuring them that Manuel's departure won't spell chaos...
...heavyweight. Many see him as the ANC President that never was (he was Nelson Mandela's preferred successor; the job went to Mbeki instead). The corporate sector, which admires his accumulative skills, would have seen his inclusion as further reassurance. Still, Ramaphosa has been out of South Africa's political scene for a long time. A cabinet position would have been something; his absence is merely more of the same...
...activist in the country with the world's biggest HIV/AIDs population, Hogan might have been great - and a refreshing corrective to Mbeki. But she is also a person of singular conscience - and criticized her own government's decision to refuse the Dalai Lama entry to a conference in South Africa last month. Even after 15 years in power, the ANC remains a revolutionary party and doesn't take kindly to what it perceives as indiscipline. Out went Hogan...
What about all the dire predictions, particularly in the British press, about South Africa under Zuma becoming the new Zimbabwe? Mugabe is Zimbabwe and has been for 29 years. South Africa is far more sophisticated. It has big business, big independent media and big independent civil society. The government is only one of many determinants of South Africa's future...