Pravin Gordhan, who held three positions in South Africa’s cabinet and won plaudits for standing up to Jacob Zuma during his scandal-marred presidency, has died. He was 75.
Gordhan died in hospital in the early hours of Friday morning after battling cancer, his family said in an emailed statement.
A veteran anti-apartheid activist and high-ranking member of the African National Congress, Gordhan made a name for himself within government by leading an overhaul of the national tax agency years before serving under Zuma.
Recruited to the post in 1999 by then-Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, Gordhan served as commissioner of the South African Revenue Service for a decade and transformed it into a world-class organization, overhauling its systems and recruiting a new team of highly skilled personnel. Government revenue more than tripled during his tenure as an additional 1.5 million people were drawn into the tax net.
Zuma was appointed president in 2009—weeks after prosecutors dropped charges against him of taking bribes from arms dealers—and tapped Gordhan to replace Manuel as finance minister. Gordhan steered the economy through the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and the economy grew by an average of about 1.8% annually during the five years he held the post.
After winning a second term in 2014, Zuma assigned the finance portfolio to Nhlanhla Nene and named Gordhan as cooperative governance and traditional affairs minister. Linked to a succession of scandals, Zuma in 2015 fired Nene and replaced him with a little-known lawmaker, David van Rooyen.
The move triggered a selloff in the rand and the nation’s bonds, and business and ruling-party leaders pressured Zuma to reconsider. Four days later, he announced that Gordhan and Van Rooyen would swap portfolios.
But Zuma repeatedly undermined Gordhan’s authority, describing Van Rooyen as the most qualified finance minister he’d ever appointed and rebuffing Gordhan’s request to fire tax chief Tom Moyane for insubordination. Gordhan defied Zuma’s attempts to open the spending taps and finance a nuclear-expansion program, presenting a national budget that proposed spending curbs and higher taxes.
