Former South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan has died.
He died in the early hours of Friday.
From the time he was 22 years old, Gordhan lived a life in service of South Africa.
As a young man in the early seventies, he became an activist against apartheid, first as a leader of the Natal Indian Congress.
A qualified pharmacist, he was fired by the state’s health authorities for his resistance to apartheid.
With others, he helped build the network of community organisations which would eventually mushroom into the United Democratic Front.
While he is best known as South Africa’s most successful taxman and as a slayer of state capture, for which he and his family were mercilessly attacked, Gordhan had a much richer pedigree.
His nerves of steel were evident as he took on the Gupta family, who were the architects with then president Jacob Zuma of state capture.
As a young activist, he was repeatedly jailed, but always emerged to return to service.
He was one of the birthing fathers of the new order and served as a chairperson of the multiparty negotiations, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, and then became a member of parliament for the ANC in 1994.
TAXMAN AND MINISTER
The new state, left bankrupt by the last apartheid government, needed to urgently bolster the fiscus and fix the Department of Inland Revenue, as the South African Revenue Service (SARS) was then called.
He became deputy commissioner in 1998 and took on the commissioner role in 1999.
It was, arguably, the leadership role he most savoured.
As SARS commissioner, Gordhan honed many of the leadership traits he would use in his future political life.
He transformed SARS by elevating its staff’s purpose from collecting taxes to building a country.
He walked the offices and turned SARS around from a paper-based and bureaucratic institution into the modern, tax-collecting machine it is today.
The institution was so well respected that Gordhan was the head of the World Customs Union for six years from 2000.
He and his team drove up collections, enabling a golden era for South Africa’s fiscus when Trevor Manuel was finance minister.
Together, they enabled South Africa’s first (and only) budget surplus.
When Manuel left, Gordhan took up the mantle of finance minister, quickly settling into the national treasury as a safe pair of hands, until he was deployed to a different cabinet position by Zuma, who could not get the nuclear deal he so coveted past Gordhan and his team, who threw regulatory boulders up to prevent it from happening. – Daily Maverick
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