1. Trevor Andrew Manuel was born on 31 January 1956 and is a retired South African politician and former anti-apartheid activist who served in the cabinet of South Africa between 1994 and 2014.
53 Facts About Trevor Manuel
1. 2.
Trevor Manuel was the Minister of Finance from 1996 to 2009 under three successive presidents.
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Trevor Manuel was the first post-apartheid Minister of Trade and Industry from 1994 to 1996 and later the Minister in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission from 2009 to 2014.
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Trevor Manuel was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress from 1991 to 2012.
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Trevor Manuel became Mandela's Minister of Finance in a cabinet reshuffle in April 1996 and remained in that office for the next 13 years, serving throughout the terms of Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe.
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Trevor Manuel presided over sustained economic growth in South Africa, which admirers credited partly to the market-friendly Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy of the National Treasury.
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Trevor Manuel oversaw the establishment of the commission, becoming its inaugural chairperson, and presided over the drafting of the National Development Plan 2030, which was adopted in 2012.
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Trevor Manuel announced his retirement from politics ahead of the May 2014 general election.
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Trevor Manuel's parents were Philma van Sohnen, a garment worker, and Abraham James Manuel, who worked for the Cape Town City Council until he died when Manuel was 13.
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Trevor Manuel attended Windermere Primary School in Kensington and then Harold Cressy High School in District Six.
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Trevor Manuel later said that "politics came to me" when his primary school class was halved by the implementation of the Bantu Education Act, and he was active in local civic organisations as a teenager.
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Trevor Manuel briefly joined the youth wing of the Labour Party in 1969, at the encouragement of his father, but dropped out due to "peer pressure at school" and due to his own disagreement with the party's decision to participate in the Coloured Representative Council.
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From 1974 to 1981, Trevor Manuel worked as a construction technician while maintaining his involvement in civic and anti-apartheid activism.
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Trevor Manuel was initially attracted by the politics of the Black Consciousness Movement, but in 1979 he travelled to Botswana to join the exiled African National Congress, in his words hoping to become "a revolutionary with a big beard and a big gun".
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In 1983, Trevor Manuel was a founding member of the Western Cape branch of the United Democratic Front, a popular front against apartheid.
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Trevor Manuel was detained for the first time on 22 October 1985, held under the Internal Security Act, and released a month later under a stringent banning order.
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Also during this period in 1989, Trevor Manuel returned briefly to the private sector as a policy manager for the Mobil Foundation in Cape Town.
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In February 1990, the apartheid government unbanned the ANC to facilitate negotiations to end apartheid, and Trevor Manuel was appointed as the party's deputy coordinator in the Western Cape while legal party structures were established.
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Trevor Manuel was elected as the regional branch's publicity secretary when the first regional party conference was held.
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However, he was promoted: the national ANC held its first conference inside South Africa in Durban in July 1991 and Trevor Manuel was elected to the party's top executive organ, the National Executive Committee; by number of votes received, he was ranked 19th of the committee's 50 members, receiving support across 64 per cent of all ballots cast.
21.
Trevor Manuel was elected to the ANC National Working Committee.
22.
Trevor Manuel worked closely with Tito Mboweni, who took responsibility for trade and industrial policy while Manuel focused on fiscal policy.
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Trevor Manuel was thorough and conservative, always the voice of reason.
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Trevor Manuel remained the ANC's head of economic planning until the 1994 general election.
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In South Africa's first post-apartheid elections in April 1994, Trevor Manuel stood as a candidate for the ANC and was elected to the National Assembly, the lower house of the new South African Parliament.
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Trevor Manuel was appointed as Minister of Trade and Industry in the Government of National Unity under President Nelson Mandela.
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Trevor Manuel said that his priorities would include aligning trade policy and industrial strategy; seizing opportunities "to open up our domestic market to international competition", thus reversing the isolation of the apartheid era; and encouraging long-term investments in human and other capital.
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Trevor Manuel announced in December 1994 that he would seek to strengthen competition policy to reduce barriers to entry and eliminate monopolistic collusion.
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At the time of his appointment to the ministry, Trevor Manuel said that he was a Keynesian and did not believe that "fiscal discipline is an end in itself".
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Trevor Manuel was re-elected ranked seventh in December 1997 and ranked first in December 2002.
31.
At the December 2007 elective congress, the 52nd National Conference in Polokwane, he was one of only a handful of Mbeki's cabinet who was re-elected, in Trevor Manuel's case ranked 57th of 80.
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However, markets recovered when, less than an hour later, Trevor Manuel's spokesperson announced that he would be willing to continue to serve under Mbeki's successor.
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Over a decade later, former COPE spokesperson and journalist JJ Tabane alleged that Trevor Manuel had been "in the background" during COPE's formation; Trevor Manuel strongly denied any involvement and threatened to sue Tabane for defamation.
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In October 2016, the Citizen reported, based on access to a leaked document, that Trevor Manuel had approved a R100-million modernisation contract that had been awarded at the South African Revenue Service without a proper bidding process.
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Trevor Manuel was finance minister at the time that the investigative unit was established by Pravin Gordhan, then the SARS Commissioner and later Trevor Manuel's politically embattled successor as finance minister.
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Trevor Manuel later conceded that the purchase was "an error of judgement".
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Trevor Manuel's ministry published a green paper on national strategic planning in September 2009.
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Cosatu called for it to be withdrawn, with Zwelinzima Vavi warning that Trevor Manuel would become a de facto "imperial" prime minister and would marginalise other ministries and the Tripartite Alliance.
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Nonetheless, when President Zuma announced the composition of the inaugural 24-member National Planning Commission on 30 April 2010, Trevor Manuel was appointed as chairperson, with businessman Cyril Ramaphosa as his deputy.
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On 2 March 2011, Manuel published an open letter to Jimmy Manyi, the head of the Government Communication and Information System, accusing Manyi of being "a racist in the mould of H F Verwoerd".
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The choice facing us is very clear: do we stand behind the humane and generous values of Minister Trevor Manuel, or do we, by staying silent, lend our support to the mischievous and dangerous notions of Mr Manyi.
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However, the ANC Youth League professed itself "disturbed" by Manuel's letter, saying, "We now do not know who Trevor Manuel represents, because his remarks falls squarely into the political agenda of right-wing political forces opposed to the ANC".
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Trevor Manuel's letter drew a sharp response from Paul Ngobeni, who, writing in the Sunday Independent, called for Trevor Manuel to be fired.
44.
Trevor Manuel concluded his 21-year tenure on the ANC National Executive Committee in December 2012, when he declined a nomination to stand for re-election at the ANC's upcoming 53rd National Conference.
45.
In March 2014, when Parliament closed for recess ahead of that year's general election, Trevor Manuel announced his retirement from politics.
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Trevor Manuel told the house that, "At some point serving leadership must give way so that new blood, fired up with life-changing ideas, can take society to a higher level of development".
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Meanwhile, Trevor Manuel retained his public profile, including as a critic of President Zuma.
48.
However, Trevor Manuel returned to public service in advisory capacities after Zuma was succeeded as president by Cyril Ramaphosa, Trevor Manuel's former deputy at the National Planning Commission.
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The EFF alleged in a statement that Trevor Manuel presided over a "nepotistic" and "corrupt" process, remarks later found to be defamatory by the Pretoria High Court.
50.
In 1985, Trevor Manuel married Lynne Matthews, with whom he had three sons.
51.
At the time, Trevor Manuel was rumoured to have had an extramarital affair with Maria Ramos, the director-general in his ministry.
52.
Trevor Manuel married Ramos on 27 December 2008 in Franschhoek.
53.
Trevor Manuel served two terms as chancellor, a largely ceremonial position, before he was succeeded by Thandi Modise in 2017.