Pravin Gordhan, Former South African Minister and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies at 75

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.  

Finance Minister

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.  

Fraud charges

In 2016, prosecutors said Gordhan would face two fraud charges for illegally approving the early retirement of a subordinate, resulting in 1.1 million rand ($61,000) of wasteful expenditure. Civil-rights groups, the heads of some of South Africa’s biggest companies and scores of ANC leaders rallied to Gordhan’s defense, and the case was dropped due to a lack of evidence. 

Gordhan said he’d been the victim of “persecution and political mischief” driven by “rent-seekers” intent on accessing state coffers.

In March 2017, Gordhan flew to London to promote South Africa as an investment destination, and upon his arrival he received a message from Zuma’s office instructing him to return home. He was fired shortly thereafter, part of a major cabinet reshuffle that saw Zuma appoint loyalists to key posts. 

Zuma stood down as ANC leader in December 2017 and the ANC forced him to quit as president two months later to stem a loss of electoral support. A judicial commission of inquiry found that state entities were systematically looted during Zuma’s almost nine-year tenure with his tacit consent. 

Rolling blackouts

Cyril Ramaphosa, who succeeded Zuma, named Gordhan as his public enterprises minister and tasked him with turning around mismanaged, cash-strapped state companies. While their boards and management teams were overhauled, they continued to underperform, resulting in the country being subjected to rolling power blackouts and logistics snarlups that hamstrung the economy. 

Pravin Jamnadas Gordhan was born on April 12, 1949, in the eastern port city of Durban, the son of traders who had immigrated to South Africa from India in the 1920s.

He became immersed in the struggle against White-minority rule while studying pharmacy and was detained three times for his political activism, enduring torture at the hands of the police. He played a key role in negotiating a peaceful end to apartheid and became a lawmaker for the party after the nation’s first multiracial elections in 1994. 

Gordhan announced his retirement ahead of May 2024 elections and had kept a low profile since then. He had a daughter, Anisha, with his wife, Vanitha.