Pravin Gordhan, a flawed politician who doesn't deserve high praise

 There's been the expected fulsome (definition: excessively flattering), even obsequious commentary on former ANC finance and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan's death. On CapeTalk former ANC MP and political commentator Melanie Verwoed gushed about his sharp intellect like he was Stephen Hawking. 

Most commentary including in Daily Maverick is about him being a supposed corruption fighter nonpareil.

Intelligent he may have been but the rest is overblown. Intelligent as a politician and office bearer he wasn't. Gordhan was part of the ANC's system of patronage, corruption and managerial neglect who contributed to SA being where it is. He personally may not have been the recipient of ill-gotten financial gains, but he was part of a system of state-wide corruption, the worst anywhere in the world, who allowed corruption to proceed unstopped.

His mild, hesitant and too late resistance to singular acts of corruption in the Zuma government, for which he was then and now sanctified by the left, came late in both their second terms and only when Gordhan was under threat of being fired.

But as minister of finance he must be judged on his merits. GDP declined from over 3% to under 1% where it's still. Debt to GDP rose from 26% in 2009 to over 50% during his terms which ended in 2017. Government expenditure doubled to R1.6 trillion in 2016/17, revenue lagging by R156 billion. There were credit and ratings agencies downgrades too. 

This indicates he was bad at his job. If you argue he alone was not responsible for SA's financial decline (he wasn't but could have done something about but didn't because he controlled the money), then conversely, he was part of the corrupt administration and not the country's saviour.

Gordhan, like Ramaphosa (another left hero), facilitated grand corruption by looking the other way (as Manuel, another false god of the left, did with the arms deal by omission and commission). He and ANC parliamentarians pledged loyalty to Zuma time and again despite the known extent of Zuma's, ANC's and their accomplices alleged, verified crimes. 

One of the first things he did as finance minister in 2009 was capitulate to bank threats and pressurise the Competition Commission to cancel its investigation into high, excessive bank charges that today squeeze consumers and earn the Big Four sky-high revenue, easily R50 billion a year. (The IMF's David Lipton identified the big banks as a particular hindrance to SA economic growth.)

Paradoxically, Gordhan's supposed resistance to corruption was more about saving his job in Zuma's cabinet than real resistance. Nene was the one whose metal resulted in his firing. Bravery there, no self-pitying crying to the media as Gordhan did. 

He was a weak finance minister and even weaker public enterprises minister, especially his invisibility as Eskom plunged SA into darkness and the debacle over SAA, which he tried to keep secret. 

But still the left and mainstream media praise Gordhan, remembering another time before 1994 when he and ANC were still idealistic and relatively innocent. He was no Horatius on the bridge, as RW Johnson wrote in 2015. But another in a line of deeply flawed ANC members. 

I'd have thought that after 20, now 30 years of knowledge about the ANC there'd be no Republican-Trump-like worshipping of ANC figures. But no. I guess once a believer, always a believer.