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Tito Mboweni, South Africa’s first black central bank governor since the end of apartheid, died on Saturday at the age of 65 after a short illness.
Mr. Mboweni was instrumental in building a democratic nation in South Africa, initially serving as Minister of Labor in Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet, and in 1999 was appointed as the first Central Bank Governor of the African National Congress, a position he held for 10 years. Served for a year.
Years later, Mboweni told the Financial Times how he had to rebuild the bank virtually from scratch after most of its white staff left for fear of working for black men. He retained a small number of banks and returned them to the bastion of monetary policy orthodoxy that remains to this day. In town, the notes he signed were affectionately known as “Titos.”
That was quite a rise for a man born in 1959 in what was then a remote part of the Transvaal. His father was a chef, but due to apartheid laws, he left home for long periods to work in Johannesburg.
Radicalized at university, Mboweni interrupted his studies in the early 1980s with the intention of joining the armed wing of the ANC in Lesotho. However, the ANC had other ideas. They needed an economist, not an inexperienced hothead, so they sent him to England to study at the University of East Anglia.
Larger than life and cheerful, Mboweni was a complex character. Fashionably dressed, he was intelligent, bombastic, charming, and uproariously funny.
Although he fell out of step with many of his ANC colleagues and became a free market purist, he remained loyal to the party throughout his life. He was an outspoken opponent of former president Jacob Zuma, whom he accused of looting the state, but remained adamant that “the ANC is bigger than individuals.”
After leaving the central bank in 2009, he moved into the private sector as chairman of AngloGold Ashanti and advised Goldman Sachs. He was recalled to government as finance minister in 2019 by Cyril Ramaphosa, who succeeded Zuma as president, and guided the economy through the coronavirus pandemic.
He continued to get into trouble for his outspoken views, including declaring that he would not invest a penny of his own money in South African Airways, the country’s loss-making flag carrier. He retired in 2021 and has since become best known for his rapid-fire tweets about everything from his favorite recipes to the cleanliness of Rwanda’s streets.
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“He was the godfather of ANC economic policy,” said Colin Coleman, Goldman Sachs’ former sub-Saharan Africa chief executive who met Mboweni in 1987. He remained steadfast to the end that the ANC was his movement. ”
Prime Minister Ramaphosa called Mboweni’s death a shock, describing him as “a standard-bearer for the global forum for our economy and the wider developing economy”. Enoch Godongwana, who replaced Mboweni as finance minister, said the country had lost a “giant, a thinker, a doer and above all a patriot”.
“We will miss his candor and sharp wit,” the central bank said.
In 2019, Mboweni defended the ANC in an interview with the FT, saying it had won dignity for black South Africans. He said at the time that he wanted to die like Congolese singer Papa Wemba, who performs on stage, perhaps giving a lecture about inflation targeting. “The ANC’s obituary would have said, ‘He died in the line of duty,'” he says.
