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The confirmation that axed finance minister Nhlanhla Nene now has a full-time job – and it is not the one President Jacob Zuma had promised – will serve to fuel suspicions that the president never intended for him to get the Brics position in the first place.
President Zuma removed Nene in October last year without giving any reasons.
The move resulted in the rand plunging to a record low against the dollar and JSE stocks losing an estimated R170 billion in value.
After intense public pressure, two days later President Zuma announced that the “urgency” of removing Nene was “occasioned by the need to send nominations to Shanghai, of the head of the African Regional Centre of the New Development Bank ... Nene is our candidate for this position”.
But even at that time, few believed Zuma, suspecting that he made up the reason after realising the enormity of public resistance to Nene’s reshuffling.
In all interviews conducted with Nene since, he has insisted that he was never approached for the Brics position.
Zuma tried to play up this position as some kind of promotion for Nene, but the New Development Bank website shows that the finance ministers of the five participating countries sit on the bank’s highest decision-making body, its board of governors. So if Zuma wanted Nene to participate in the bank, it could have been through this board.
The head of the regional bank is a lowly position in the Brics structure, superseded by the board of governors, then the board of directors and senior management based in Shanghai.
That Nene, a man groomed for six years as deputy to be finance minister, has been lost to the private sector is yet another indictment on the poor leadership of President Zuma.
To this day, South Africans are left to speculate on the real reason Nene was dumped to make way for a little-known backbencher. The whole reshuffle was clumsily implemented and the economy was nearly ruined in the process.
Zuma has since complained that some people, including those in the media, do not fully respect his “prerogative” as president.
But prerogative, in the hands of a leader who does not mind outsourcing Cabinet appointments to crony friends, can be a dangerous tool.
