Clash between Manuel and Patel may divide cabinet
Inside Parliament
October 12, 2009
By Donwald Pressly
There was an air of despondency in the Old Assembly chamber last week when National Planning Minister Trevor Manuel made an appearance to tell MPs about his job.
The ad hoc committee on the green paper on national strategic planning received a wordy account of Manuel's plan of action. He sounded like a rather bored lecturer who had been at a tertiary institution a little too long.
Attempts by MPs and journalists to extract a comment on Cosatu's mutterings about his role in planning elicited little response. Manuel called for the debate to be "de-personalised", oddly a word that was made at the recent Cosatu congress by Thobile Ntola, the president of SA Democratic Teachers' Union, who said: "We want to de-personalise the resolution (on the green paper)". ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe had to come to Manuel's rescue. He told the trade union congress: "To resolve on an individual is always a dangerous act for an organisation."
President Jacob Zuma, clearly now also feeling the heat from the Left, also pointed out that a National Planning Commission had been agreed to as an alliance summit resolution in October last year.
Cosatu had, of course, called for a complete overhaul of the content of the National Planning Commission for a "vigorous" engagement on the alliance's green paper.
To ensure that there was no confusion, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi referred to the green paper as representing "a massive turf battle in cabinet".
He indicated that certain ministers - most notably Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel - were being sidelined while Manuel had been positioned at the centre of processes.
Coincidentally, two days after Manuel's rather lacklustre performance at Parliament, Patel held a seminar to look at the alarming figures showing just how much South Africa's Gini coefficient - which measures the gap between the rich and poor - had risen during the democratic era.
Although the poor were less poor than 15 years ago, the gap between the rich and poor was massive.
An upbeat Patel has a mastery of the language. He did not say anything nasty about Manuel, of course.
But in the debate, which included economists Haroon Bhorat and Moazam Mahmood, it was clear that former president Thabo Mbeki - and by extension the Manuel era of state fiscal management - was being viewed dimly. Mahmood even warned of social instability due to the widening income gap.
One would not, of course, mention the over-payment of ministers, parastatal chiefs and other government odds and bobs, as contributing to this gap. Perhaps we have already seen evidence of this instability in Balfour and Standerton of late.
The divide in the cabinet between the Mbeki-ites, like Manuel, and the Cosatu-ites, like Patel, is threatening to grow into a chasm. One is left with the distinct impression that the rather delicate rapprochement has to give at some stage. It may be sooner than one imagines.
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