Impatient Manuel berates the messenger

Perhaps it is Planning Minister Trevor Manuel's advancing age that has made him increasingly tetchy, more so than he was in his glory days as finance minister.

Ever since the umbrella incident - he is alleged to have hit a female journalist with an umbrella at the watershed ANC Polokwane conference in 2007 - his relationship with the media has been on an ever more slippery slope.

Perhaps it tracks his declining fortunes in the ruling party. After having been the most popular candidate for the ANC's national executive committee in 2002, he subsequently slipped to 57th in the ranking - out of 60 elected members - at the Polokwane conference.

Once again this week, during a briefing on the National Planning Commission appointed by President Jacob Zuma after a year of preparation, he went off. In a clear case of blaming the messenger, it was Anna Majavu's turn to be savaged.
Majavu, a quietly diligent Sowetan parliamentary correspondent, tackled him on Cosatu's concerns that the commission was a little heavy on business people and carried no labour representatives to speak of.

He responded: "Let me ask you which part of Cosatu took that decision? Was it a central committee... or was it written in a car park somewhere by the media liaison officer? If you don't know... if no official part of an organisation took that decision, why do you continue to give it legs?"

He snapped: "Things require a legitimacy... every day you have to respond to the same statement. I will not respond to it."

Then yesterday morning on the Afrikaans radio programme, Monitor, he was asked about the issue again.

He said: "I do not pay any attention to them." But the remarks that followed indicated that he had been ruminating over the matter. He asked who the people were from Cosatu that were criticising the make-up of the commission.

It must be a spokesperson - an apparent reference to Patrick Craven - because it was not the senior management, he said.

Then, tellingly, he went on to comment that in European countries the budget was drafted by the economic planning minister and, notably, not the finance minister. This was not the case in South Africa because members of the commission were not drawn from the governing party.

He then said that he expected the criticism to continue. Next there would be accusations hurled that there were not enough short people or women on the commission, he said.

Vowing to hold his ground, Manuel said Zuma was satisfied with the appointments, but the question had to be asked: Is a top-heavy - and probably expensive - unrepresentative body necessary at all?

Judging from the slow response to phone calls to some of its top leaders, the commission - which is tasked to do the long-term planning work that highly-paid ministers are apparently unable to carry out - looks certain also to be opaque.

Manuel referred to journalists as "perverse and voyeuristic" in the president's budget vote, asking why there were too many of this and too few of that.

Source: Business Report