Pravin Gordhan, the current Minister of Public Enterprises, will not be returning to Parliament after the coming elections.
Gordhan made a name for himself as head of the South African Revenue Service (Sars). He entered government in 2009, when he was appointed as Minister of Finance. He was moved to the ministry of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in 2014, and brought back to the Finance ministry after President Zuma’s ill-fated attempt to install Des Van Rooyen in the office in late 2015.
Gordhan was widely seen as a competent and honest politician, and one of the few in the senior rungs of the ANC who was not complicit in state capture. For much the same reasons, he was targeted – sometimes in harshly racist terms – by others, most recently the EFF.
Gordhan has, however, been firmly statist in his role as public enterprises minister, with little sympathy for possible privatisation. He has recently courted controversy by refusing to disclose the terms of private participation in South African Airways, claiming that the information is commercially sensitive.
It is unclear whether he will be retiring from public life entirely.
[Image: Gordan, in 2010, when he was finance minister, https://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/4583117271]