JABULANI SIKHAKHANE: Pravin Gordhan more complex than black-or-white portraits of him

To borrow some of the phrasing by Bram Fischer’s biographer, Stephen Clingman, it often takes a long time for the matrix that made the path and trajectory of a life to be fully understood. That’s why it can take more than one book to get to the full measure of a person. 

Such will be the case with Pravin Gordhan, who died last week. The matrix that shaped his life can be traced to Durban — where he grew up to become a fierce activist against apartheid — to his detention and torture, to his part in the negotiations that led to the 1994 democracy elections, and the post-’94 talks that shaped the local government transition. 

Then he spent many years chiselling the SA Revenue Service (Sars) into one of the most successful post-apartheid institutions, before moving on to the finance ministry. 

This matrix has yet to be fully laid out in all its nuance and complexity. But what can be said at this stage is that he was a more complex a character than the black-or-white portraits that have been sketched of him. 

What’s fair to say, too, is that these sketches are to be expected of a man who wielded so much power, first as Sars commissioner and then finance minister. And of a man who didn’t believe in half-measures. He was either in, waist-deep, or not; was for or against. No halfway stations.

But there are glimpses of PG, as he was fondly called, that would show up when you spent time with him. Deep down in him there lived a rebellious spirit, imbued with boyish playfulness. 

He would meet me at OR Tambo airport for an early morning flight to Cape Town or Durban with, “Howzit, uncle J?” Then he would say he had been up since 2.30am to review the draft speech I had emailed to him the day before. “It needed a bit of voema,” he would say. Or “It needed a bit of masala.” I soon learnt this was a code for, “I have changed the speech, it had no bite”, for which his gauge would often be: “what’s the headline?”. 

Carried away

PG’s appetite for voema reflected this rebelliousness. Speeches by finance ministers are supposed to be dull, for good reason. A finance minister’s word, especially a misplaced or misunderstood word, can roil financial markets. Finance ministers must thus master the art of saying a lot but without saying much really, yet leaving their audiences satisfied. The art is more performance than substance. 

But the rebel in PG struggled with these harnesses. His rebellious nature needed voema, which at times got into him into trouble. Such as in November 2012, when he spoke to the WWF — not the wrestling crowd but the natural resources custodians. The room was packed, and the only place the organisers could find for me was a chair alongside the podium. That meant I was sitting facing the audience, which meant I couldn’t signal anything to PG about time.

Carried away by the voema wave, PG expanded his talk from the scheduled 20 minutes to a 40-minute marathon. By the time he passed the 30-minute mark most of the WWF faithful were auditing the rhino population in their heads. I was panicking internally but had to keep my composure. Some of the veterans had nodded off, a point that was not lost on PG, who rounded off his speech by saying, “I hope I’ve agitated you enough to stay awake on a hot Cape Town day.” 

PG had no ministerial airs about him. On one visit to London our interview with The Guardian was running late, spilling over to preparations for the next engagement. He instructed other officials to take the only vehicle we had for the trip, leaving the two of us to take the underground to the next meeting. 

Pravin had a soft spot for Bertolt Brecht, despite having long forgotten the title of the book by the German playwright and poet he had read in his youth. But there was a glint in his eye when he later told me that as a farewell gift in 2014 National Treasury officials had given him a copy of Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life.

It now seems to have been a fitting gift for a man who, in Brecht’s words, didn’t fear death so much but rather the inadequate life. Or a life of half-measures. 

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.