OBITUARY
TIM COHEN: Derek Keys: a fearsome intellectual who led our fiscal discipline model
Derek Keys will be remembered for his short but crucial stint as finance minister during SA’s transition, but arguably the greatest act of his fearsome intellect was the reconfiguration of Gencor, the successor to the sprawling mining and industrial empire of Randlords George and Leopold Albu. Keys died on Sunday of natural causes at the age of 86, at his home in Killarney, Johannesburg. He was finance minister from 1992 to September 1994. When he resigned abruptly as finance minister only a couple of months into the Nelson Mandela administration, the markets went into shock. They need not have done so; Keys had left a sound legacy. He had been brought into the cabinet — first as trade and industry minister and, within months, as finance minister — by former president FW de Klerk just as the National Party government was ditching its apartheid policies. It fell to him and to his open style of dealing with people and issues to persuade the ANC in the run-up to the 1994 elections that...
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