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Trevor Andrew Manuel (born 31 January 1956) is a retired South African politician and former anti-apartheid activist who served in the cabinet of South Africa between 1994 and 2014. He was the Minister of Finance from 1996 to 2009 under three successive presidents. He was also the first post-apartheid Minister of Trade and Industry from 1994 to 1996 and later the Minister in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission from 2009 to 2014. He was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1991 to 2012.
Born and raised in Cape Town, Manuel trained as a construction technician but was a full-time political activist from 1981, initially as the general secretary of the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee. Between 1983 and 1990, he was the regional secretary of the United Democratic Front and a member of the front's national executive. During the negotiations to end apartheid, he worked at Shell House as the head of the ANC's internal department of economic planning from 1991 to 1994.
Elected to the National Assembly in the first post-apartheid elections of April 1994, Manuel was also appointed as the Minister of Trade and Industry in Nelson Mandela's Government of National Unity. During his two years in that portfolio, he championed South Africa's post-apartheid economic liberalisation. He became Mandela's Minister of Finance in a cabinet reshuffle in April 1996 and remained in that office for the next 13 years, serving throughout the terms of Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe. He presided over sustained economic growth in South Africa, which admirers credited partly to the market-friendly Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy of the National Treasury. Though his critics in the Tripartite Alliance derided him as Neoliberalism, others described him as a pragmatist.
After the April 2009 general election, Manuel was retained in President Jacob Zuma's cabinet as Minister in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission. He oversaw the establishment of the commission, becoming its inaugural chairperson, and presided over the drafting of the National Development Plan 2030, which was adopted in 2012. He announced his retirement from politics ahead of the May 2014 general election. Since 2017, he has been the chairperson of Old Mutual Emerging Markets.
He attended Windermere Primary School in Kensington and then Harold Cressy High School in District Six. He later said that "politics came to me" when his primary school class was halved by the implementation of the Bantu Education Act, and he was active in local civic organisations as a teenager. He also briefly joined the youth wing of the Labour Party in 1969, at the encouragement of his father, but dropped out due to "peer pressure at school" and due to his own disagreement with the party's decision to participate in the Coloured Representative Council. After matriculating, he completed a tertiary diploma in civil and structural engineering at the Peninsula Technikon.
He's the one who, in the rough-and-tumble world of Cape Flats politics, once even punched out current Western Cape Nat MEC Peter Marais at a public meeting; the long-haired biker who used to cruise around in tight Lee jeans, studded shoes and leather jacket. He's the one who used to lead the Klaberjass sessions in Victor Verster... he was a rough-hewn United Democratic Front street-activist.Because of his political activities, Manuel spent a cumulative 35 months in police detention between 1985 and 1990. He was detained for the first time on 22 October 1985, held under the Internal Security Act, and released a month later under a stringent banning order. On the next occasion, he was held at Victor Verster without trial for almost two years, from August 1986 to July 1988, then rearrested from September 1988 to February 1989. Again released on a banning order, he was arrested once again in August 1989, and held for two months, after he contravened the order by speaking at a press conference in Athlone. Also during this period in 1989, Manuel returned briefly to the private sector as a policy manager for the Mobil Foundation in Cape Town.
In the aftermath of the conference, he was recruited full-time to the ANC's headquarters at Shell House, where he was head of the party's nascent department of economic planning. He worked closely with Tito Mboweni, who took responsibility for trade and industrial policy while Manuel focused on fiscal policy. Because of his lack of experience in economics, Manuel's appointment received a dubious reaction from the press, from his friends, and from Manuel himself. Manuel later said that he thought he had been chosen for the department because he was ideologically "agnostic" on questions of policy; in the description of his UDF colleague, Cheryl Carolus, he "had a remarkable ability to listen, to figure out what he needed to achieve, and then to go for it without ideological baggage. He was thorough and conservative, always the voice of reason." In addition, Mark Gevisser considered Manuel a protégé of Thabo Mbeki and noted that Manuel was politically successful in the ANC because he was "one of the few people comfortable in both the ex-UDF nexus around Cyril Ramaphosa – his natural home – and the exile nexus around Mbeki".
He remained the ANC's head of economic planning until the 1994 general election. According to Gevisser, during this period, Manuel "played a critical role in guiding the ANC away from its traditional adherence to centralised planning and towards the market economy it was to espouse".
According to observers, his greatest achievement "was to take a department whose sole raison d'être under was to stifle competition, and make it the vanguard of a 'liberalised' market economy", among other things by embracing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and reducing tariffs and other Protectionism measures. However, his support for liberalisation made him unpopular with trade unions, including the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union and other members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), the ANC's Tripartite Alliance partner.
During this period, in December 1994, the ANC's 49th National Conference elected Manuel to his second term as a member of the party's National Executive Committee. By number of votes received, he was ranked 17th of the 60 members elected to the committee.
No, I don't think finance ministers can take responsibility for all of those things... You see, one of the misplaced issues regarding economic discourse in this country is that there's this belief that macroeconomics is everything. Economists would use their own arcane language and say macro-economic stability is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. You need a series of structural policies that are not macro. And those are out of the purview of any minister of finance.Long regarded as a pragmatist, Manuel said in 2013 that he still had little technical knowledge of economics, but "I knew that if I set this thing up where people can come with the numbers, and I ask the questions based on life experience and understanding and broad political objectives, then it will work." He was also commended for his prominent international profile; among other positions, he was Ban Ki-moon's special envoy for development finance and the chairperson of a committee established by the International Monetary Fund to consider organisational and governance reform of the fund.
The aftermath of Mbeki's resignation also saw the formation of an ANC breakaway, the Congress of the People (COPE), by Mbeki's supporters. Over a decade later, former COPE spokesperson and journalist JJ Tabane alleged that Manuel had been "in the background" during COPE's formation; Manuel strongly denied any involvement and threatened to sue Tabane for defamation.
In October 2016, the Citizen reported, based on access to a leaked document, that Manuel had approved a R100-million modernisation contract that had been awarded at the South African Revenue Service (SARS) without a proper bidding process.
In August 2017, Manuel and his one-time Deputy Finance Minister, Jabu Moleketi, were questioned by the Hawks in their investigation into the activities of the so-called SARS rogue unit, an elite investigative unit that was alleged to have spied on politicians and citizens. Manuel was finance minister at the time that the investigative unit was established by Pravin Gordhan, then the SARS Commissioner and later Manuel's politically embattled successor as finance minister. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) accused Manuel of complicity in the "rogue unit", though the allegations, strongly denied by Manuel, were considered by media as another part of the attempt to delegitimise the Treasury and facilitate state capture. and Michael Elliott at the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 2009]]
Manuel's appointment to the new portfolio was generally welcomed. However, early in his tenure, opposition parties criticised him for using R1.2 million in public money to purchase a luxury BMW as a ministerial vehicle. Manuel later conceded that the purchase was "an error of judgement".
Nonetheless, when President Zuma announced the composition of the inaugural 24-member National Planning Commission on 30 April 2010, Manuel was appointed as chairperson, with businessman Cyril Ramaphosa as his deputy. The commission published a draft National Development Plan for public consultation in November 2011, and the final plan was adopted by Parliament in August 2012 and by cabinet the following month. In the remaining eighteen months of the legislative term, Manuel oversaw the government's preparations to implement the plan. During this period, he was also a member of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, chaired by Pascal Lamy.
However, the ANC Youth League professed itself "disturbed" by Manuel's letter, saying, "We now do not know who Trevor Manuel represents, because his remarks falls squarely into the political agenda of right-wing political forces opposed to the ANC". Manuel's letter also drew a sharp response from Paul Ngobeni, who, writing in the Sunday Independent, called for Manuel to be fired. Ngobeni accused Manuel of being "a gangster of the worst kind", of acting as though he was "the king of Coloured people", and of seeking to undermine President Zuma and his cabinet through his "cowardly, unwarranted and racist attacks on Manyi".
In March 2014, when Parliament closed for recess ahead of that year's general election, Manuel announced his retirement from politics. He told the house that, "At some point serving leadership must give way so that new blood, fired up with life-changing ideas, can take society to a higher level of development". His decision was linked to his reduced political influence under the Zuma administration, and the Mail & Guardian concluded that he had retired "partly because he realised that, in Zuma, he did not have the kind of political backing required to implement the National Development Plan". at the Cape Town Stadium in December 2013]]
Meanwhile, Manuel retained his public profile, including as a critic of President Zuma. In April 2016, in an interview with Soweto TV, he said that it would be "in all of our interests that the president actually steps aside", and he was critical of Zuma's administration during his testimony to the Zondo Commission in February 2019. Speaking on Radio 702 in May 2022, Manuel said that he had allowed his ANC membership to lapse, reflecting that in retrospect "the magic, the stance of moral leadership that had shaped the ANC throughout my youth was gone" after the party's Polokwane conference.
However, Manuel returned to public service in advisory capacities after Zuma was succeeded as president by Cyril Ramaphosa, Manuel's former deputy at the National Planning Commission. In February 2019, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni appointed Manuel to chair the panel tasked with appointing a new SARS commissioner. The EFF alleged in a statement that Manuel presided over a "nepotistic" and "corrupt" process, remarks later found to be defamatory by the Pretoria High Court. In April 2018, Ramaphosa appointed Manuel as one of his four investment envoys, and, two years later, now in his capacity as Chairperson of the African Union, Ramaphosa appointed Manuel as one of four special envoys tasked with securing international aid for Africa's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On the latter occasion, the EFF called for the African continent to reject Manuel's appointment, calling him a "puppet" of "white monopoly capital".
In late 2024, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Manuel to group of experts to promote actionable policy solutions and galvanize political and public support required to resolve the developing world’s debt crisis, chaired by Mahmoud Mohieldin. Secretary-General Appoints Group of Experts to Promote Policy Solutions to Resolve Debt Crisis United Nations, press release of 6 December 2024.
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