Manuel, Trevor A.

Trevor Andrew Manuel (born 31 January 1956) is a retired South African politician and former anti-apartheid activist who served in the cabinet of South Africa between 1994 and 2014. He was the Minister of Finance from 1996 to 2009 under three successive presidents. He was also 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. He was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1991 to 2012. Born and raised in Cape Town, Manuel trained as a construction technician but was a full-time political activist from 1981, initially as the general secretary of the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee. Between 1983 and 1990, he was the regional secretary of the United Democratic Front and a member of the front's national executive. During the negotiations to end apartheid, he worked at Shell House as the head of the ANC's internal department of economic planning from 1991 to 1994. Elected to the National Assembly in the first post-apartheid elections of April 1994, Manuel was also appointed as the Minister of Trade and Industry in Nelson Mandela's Government of National Unity. During his two years in that portfolio, he championed South Africa's post-apartheid economic liberalisation. He 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. He 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. Though his critics in the Tripartite Alliance derided him as neoliberal, others described him as a pragmatist. After the April 2009 general election, Manuel was retained in President Jacob Zuma's cabinet as Minister in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission. He 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. He announced his retirement from politics ahead of the May 2014 general election. Since 2017, he has been the chairperson of Old Mutual Emerging Markets.