SINAWO THAMBO: Ismail Momoniat’s advisory role in Treasury is neo-liberal patronage

South Africa is often credited as being full of opportunities, but what many seem to miss is that these opportunities often resemble a merry-go-round for a select few. 

These opportunities are recycled amongst a political and economic elite, while skilled and young professionals drown in unemployment with degrees in hand.

Our nation has entered a phase of sophisticated patronage, where unlike in the Zuma years, your propensity to organise a rally outside court or sing the loudest would assure you appointment and deployment, it is now the ability to sustain and craft macroeconomic policy or pursue specific legal warfare that grants you a seat at the neo-liberal table. 

The crafting of this macroeconomic policy is specific, as it relies on centering financial sector profits and foreign direct investment as a method to achieve economic growth (30 years of this methodology has failed), and the specific form of legal warfare refers, in this instance to the Zondo Commission, and the endless circle of gratification given to those who pursued the political opponents of Cyril Ramaphosa.

As we have argued earlier, the innocence or lack thereof of those implicated in the Zondo Commission of Inquiry is not our concern. The law, despite the vested interests in it by the political elite, can and must take its course. 

Our interest remains in maintaining a sense of neutrality in our law enforcement agencies, a tradition we feel is lost when the likes of Advocates Paul Pretorius and Matthew Chasklason are appointed as advisors to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), while they led and developed evidence at a separate forum and proceeded to advise the very same NPA they now work for on what to do with that evidence.

Advisory, however, seems to be the new camouflage for patronage and is not exclusive to legal warfare. It has seeped into National Treasury, and its greatest benefactor is Ismail Momoniat. 

Momoniat has a long history in the National Treasury of South Africa, one marred by controversy, complaints of micromanagement, and an aggressive stance against progressive legislation such as the Banks Amendments Bill, the nationalisation of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), and the creation of a state-owned bank.

He has been at the centre of macroeconomic policy that hardlines on removing necessary regulatory frameworks to avoid manipulative practices by commercial banks, and has been the champion of creating conditions which aid foreign direct investment as a misguided tool for economic growth, which has only yielded massive profit accumulation and profit shifting by the investors he places so much faith in to grow our economy.

Momoniat has, alongside the likes of Yunus Carrim, Ebrahim Patel, and the late Pravin Gordhan, made Treasury their personal neo-liberal laboratory, where they experiment with South Africa’s fiscal policy at the expense of mostly poor and debt-ridden South Africans. 

One would have thought there would be a reprieve from the firm grip Momoniat had on the National Treasury when he retired on 19 August 2022 because he reached the age of 65, but Momoniat is immune to the laws that govern everyone else in the public service and administration in South Africa.

Without going through any public advertising process or rigorous competition with others, he transitioned from being an Acting Deputy Director General to a technical advisor within Treasury, because seemingly even at his advanced age, South Africa would be lost without his expertise. 

This expertise seems like it has no competition, and is not subjected to interview or assessment. This is unfair and nothing less than patronage.

In his well-known bullish style and demeanour, Momoniat has assumed the functions of everyone in the Treasury because he cannot resist it, and addresses public platforms on taxation, money laundering and greylisting, the two-pot system, and macroeconomic policy, rendering the relevant director generals, deputy director generals, the spokesperson and even the minister himself, obsolete. 

We of course must resist the urge to state a categorical fact and to characterise this appropriately as rooted in a racial superiority complex, which manifests itself as entitlement, because it might distract the reader from the clear abuse of process and disregard of public service legislation.

Momoniat’s employment completely rubbishes the notion that under Ramaphosa, merit is the basis for employment and appointment, and mirrors numerous dubious appointments, such as those made by the NPA in Chasklason and Pretorius as advisors, and the ones made by Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen when he appointed four unqualified Democratic Alliance (DA) members in his office - a matter which now sits with the Public Protector and Parliament’s Ethics Committee. 

Under the so-called Government of National Unity, patronage has been entrenched, it just has the privilege of secrecy and proximity to the neo-liberal and capitalist establishment.