April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

maintain a very strict regime ... they can pump you full of anti-retrovirals,
sadly, all that you’re going to do, because you are erratic, is to develop a
series of drug-resistant diseases inside your body.”
Instead of delivering sufficient medicines, money and post-neoliberal
policy to the health system, schools and municipalities, Manuel promoted
privatization, even at the Monterrey global finance summit: “Publicprivate
partnerships are important win-win tools for governments and the
private sector, as they provide an innovative way of delivering public
services in a cost-effective manner.”
He not only supported privatisation in principle, as finance minister Manuel
put enormous pressure (equivalent to IMF conditionality) on municipalities
– especially Johannesburg in 1999 – to impose commodification on the
citizenry. In one of the world’s most important early 21st century water
wars, residents of Soweto rebelled and the French firm Suez was
eventually evicted from managing Johannesburg’s water in 2006.
Water privatisation was Washington Consensus advice, and as Manuel once
put it, “Our relationship with the World Bank is generally structured
around the reservoir of knowledge in the Bank” – with South Africa a
guinea pig for the late-1990s “Knowledge Bank” strategy. Virtually without
exception, Bank missions and neoliberal policy support in fields such as
water, land reform, housing, public works, healthcare, and
macroeconomics failed to deliver.
In spite of neoliberal ideology’s disgrace, president Jacob Zuma retained
Manuel and his policies in 2009. In September that year, Congress of SA
Trade Unions president Sdumo Dlamini called Manuel the “shop steward of
business” because of his “outrageous” plea to the World Economic Forum’s
Cape Town summit that business fight harder against workers. The
mineworkers union termed Manuel’s challenge “bile, totally irresponsible…
To say that business crumbles too easily is to reinforce business
arrogance.”
Manuel also disappointed feminists for his persistent failure to keep
budgeting promises, even transparency. “How do you measure
government’s commitment to gender equality if you don’t know where the
money’s going?”, asked the Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s Penny
Parenzee. Former ruling-party politician Pregs Govender helped developed
gender-budgeting in 1994 but within a decade complained that Manuel
reduced it to a “public relations exercise”.
As for a commitment to internationalism, in early 2009 when Pretoria
revoked a visitor’s visa for the Dalai Lama on Beijing’s orders, Manuel
defended the ban on the exiled Tibetan leader: “To say anything against
the Dalai Lama is, in some quarters, equivalent to trying to shoot Bambi.”
At the same moment Manuel was sabotaging Zimbabwe’s recovery
strategy, chosen by the new government of national unity, by insisting that
Harare first repay $1 billion in arrears to the World Bank and IMF,
otherwise “there was no way the plan could work.” Zimbabwean
economist Eddie Cross complained, “In fact the IMF specifically told us to
put the issue of debt management on the back burner… The South Africans
on the other hand have reversed that proposal – I do not know on whose
authority, but they are not being helpful at all.”
Given his biases and his miserable record, many within SA’s community,
labour, environment, women’s, solidarity and AIDS-treatment movements
would be happy to see the back of Manuel. His own career predilections