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South African veteran dies aged 75

The former Finance Minister of South Africa, Pravin Gordhan, has died at the age of 75, his family said.

A veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, he played a major role in South Africa’s transition to democracy and helped negotiate the end of white rule.

As well as finance minister, he held other senior government and administrative roles from the 1990s until he announced his retirement from politics in May.

The veteran cabinet minister died in hospital on Friday morning after a “brave short battle with cancer”, his family said in a statement.

It added that he was “surrounded by his family, close friends and comrades of his life in the freedom struggle when he died early today”.

He is credited with transforming the national tax agency – the South African Revenue Service – and making it a reliable and efficient institution between 1999 and 2009.

Gordhan was then finance minister from 2009 to 2014 and then moved to the Department of Cooperative Governance and Indigenous Affairs, a position he held for a year.

He had a second term of 16 months as finance minister from December 2015 after the debate when President Jacob Zuma appointed David van Rooyen who was unknown to this position and fired him after four days.

Gordhan was born in 1949 in the eastern port of Thekwini and his parents were traders, who had migrated to South Africa from India in the 1920s.

From the early 1970s, Gordhan, as a pharmacy student, became part of the struggle against white supremacy. For the next ten years he was a key figure in the United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition of anti-apartheid organizations.

He was imprisoned many times for his activism.

In 1991, he co-chaired the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), which was responsible for negotiating the end of apartheid and the establishment of a democratic government.

As finance minister, he was seen as two safe hands, promoting stability and discipline in the treasury.

He was a prominent figure in the fight against state capture, a term used in South Africa to describe the undue influence of private interests in government institutions, often for the purposes of corruption.

In 2017, he was surprisingly released as he was seen as protecting corruption in President Zuma’s administration, which has been heavily criticized.

The Gupta family, which is very close to Mr. Zuma, was among these allegations. Both the Guptas and Mr Zuma deny that they have done anything wrong.

In 2016, Gordhan was charged with fraud but the charges were dropped. He then described these allegations as politically motivated.

He was appointed to his last cabinet post – minister of state business – in 2018, where he was tasked with dealing with corruption in large state-owned companies such as power company Eskom and national airline South African Airways.

But for some observers he did not succeed in this role, and businesses remain in a critical situation.

Gordhan announced his retirement before the May 2024 election and has kept a low profile since then.

“I have no regrets, and I have no regrets… We have done our part,” Gordhan said in his farewell message before his death.

In his tribute to President Cyril Ramaphosa described Gordhan as an outstanding leader and anti-corruption beacon.

He urged the country to remember Gordhan’s “sacrifice” from his days fighting apartheid, until the last days of his retirement from politics.

Gordhan is survived by his wife Vanitha and their daughters Anisha and Priyesha.


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