Word: manuel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...uncertain world of stock markets, there are a few events so unambiguously frightening that they guarantee an instant crash. One is a terrorist attack on the world's biggest economy. Another is a global banking collapse. South Africa has a third trigger: the departure of Finance Minister Trevor Manuel. When Manuel, 53, resigned on Sept. 23 last year, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange fell 4% in minutes. Actually, Manuel wasn't going anywhere. President Thabo Mbeki had been ousted in an internal party coup a few days earlier and protocol demanded Manuel step down before being reappointed by Mbeki's successor...
...incident illustrates the dilemma the best public servants face. The better they do their job, the longer they have to do it. After 13 years running Africa's biggest economy, Manuel actually would quite like to do something else. "You bet I would!" he tells TIME. But any plans are on hold for now. In the middle of the global slump, he knows he's needed more than ever. "There is a silly part of me that sees this appointment as a service to the people," he says. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...only South Africans who look to him to bring order to their world. Since his appointment way back in 1996, Manuel has steered his country from near bankruptcy to steady growth. There's a long way to go. Around one-third of South Africans still live on $2 a day or less. At the same time, Manuel has also helped transform how the rich world views the poor one. Globalization has given new status to places like Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa, but the institutions that manage the global economy - the U.N., the World Bank, the International Monetary...
...current crisis gives those arguments new urgency. The downturn has demonstrated how unevenly power is distributed, and how bad that is for all of us. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Manuel warned that billion-dollar bailouts were a distraction from a bigger, supranational task: the creation of truly global regulation to oversee global capitalism. Or as he recently put it to Johannesburg weekly the Financial Mail: "If you were a doctor and your patient had major cardiovascular and lung problems, prescribing an aspirin ... might make him feel better, but would it solve the problem...
...Manuel knows what it takes to bring the powerful round to his point of view. He grew up poor in Cape Town. Under the apartheid racial-classification system, he was considered "colored," or mixed race, and thus confined to a home in the Cape Flats, the hot, treeless townships between breezy Table Mountain and leafy Stellenbosch. As a 5-year-old, he witnessed apartheid's bite when his classmates were divided by color. "Suddenly half the kids in my class at school were no longer there," he says. "And so politics came to me." In the 1970s, Manuel gravitated towards...