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Tito Mboweni, who was South Africa’s first Black central bank governor after the end of apartheid, died on Saturday aged 65 after a short illness.
Mboweni was instrumental in shaping South Africa’s democratic state, initially serving as labour minister in Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet before in 1999 becoming the African National Congress’s first appointee as central bank governor — a role he held for a decade.
Years later, Mboweni told the Financial Times how he had to rebuild the bank virtually from scratch after most of its white staff walked out in horror at the prospect of working for a Black man. He induced a few to stay and built the bank back into the bastion of orthodox monetary policy it remains today. In the townships, the notes he signed were affectionately known as “Titos”.
It was quite a rise for a man who had been born in 1959 in a remote area of what was then Transvaal. His father was a chef who because of apartheid laws spent long stretches away from home working in Johannesburg.
Radicalised at university, in the early 1980s Mboweni broke off his studies with the intention of joining the armed wing of the ANC in Lesotho. But the ANC had other ideas: it needed economists not inexperienced hotheads, so it sent him to the UK where he studied at the University of East Anglia.
A larger than life figure and bon vivant, Mboweni was a complex character. A natty dresser, he was by turns intellectual, bombastic, charming and raucously funny.
Though he became a free market purist out of step with many of his ANC colleagues, he nevertheless remained loyal to the party throughout his life. He was an open opponent of former president Jacob Zuma, whom he accused of looting the state, but he remained adamant that “the ANC is a huge thing” bigger than any individual.
After leaving the central bank in 2019, he made a foray into the private sector when he chaired AngloGold Ashanti and advised Goldman Sachs. He was called back to government as finance minister in 2019 by Cyril Ramaphosa, who succeeded Zuma as president, and shepherded the economy through the Covid-19 pandemic.
He continued to find himself in hot water for his forthright views, such as when he declared he wouldn’t invest a cent of his own money in South African Airways, the lossmaking national flag carrier. He retired in 2021 after which he became best known for his barrage of tweets on all subjects from favourite recipes to the cleanliness of Rwanda’s streets.
“He was the Godfather of ANC economic policy,” said Colin Coleman, Goldman Sachs’ former chief executive for sub-Saharan Africa, who met Mboweni in 1987. “He called out all wrongs, shook his head and banged the table often, but he was unshakeable that the ANC was his movement to the very end.”
Ramaphosa called Mboweni’s death a shock and described him as a “flag bearer in global forums for our economy and developing economies more broadly”. Enoch Godongwana, who replaced Mboweni as finance minister, said the country had lost “a titan, a thinker, a doer and, above all, a patriot”.
The central bank said it would “miss his candour and sharp wit”.
In 2019, Mboweni gave an interview to the FT in which he defended the ANC, saying it had won dignity for Black South Africans. He said at the time he would like to die like Congolese singer Papa Wemba, performing on stage, possibly giving a lecture on inflation targeting. “The ANC obituary would say, ‘He died in the line of duty’,” he said.