There are sound reasons to think that Pravin Gordhan might be politically sympathetic to a more statist economic programme than Trevor Manuel. These relate to his background and political formation. To understand this, it is necessary to know the inter-connections between a number of long-standing activists in the underground resistance to the apartheid regime, of whom Gordhan was one.
The crucial figure is the late Vella Pillay (1923-2004), a central person in the international network of the South African Communist Party and an official in the Bank of China in London for almost five decades, who was born and grew up in Johannesburg. After half a century in exile, Pillay - a founder of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London - was coordinator in the early 1990s of the Macroeconomic Research Group (Merg), a body of South African economists with a broadly marxist orientation, who compiled a report, Making Democracy Work (December 1993), which proposed a strong state presence in economic policy under a future ANC government.
This report largely guided the ANC's statist Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), which Mbeki rejected and abandoned as ANC government policy in 1996 in a high-handed manner, after minimal consultation within the ANC, the SACP and Cosatu. Mbeki's repudiation of the RDP and his firm espousal of the market-oriented Growth, Employment and Redistribution Programme (GEAR) was a primary cause of him and his colleagues being increasingly perceived within the ANC as having betrayed the Freedom Charter (1955), which had proposed very extensive nationalisation by the state of the South African economy.
As Mark Gevisser writes in the revised, second edition of his biography of Thabo Mbeki, published this year, Manuel as head of the ANC's Department of Economic Policy in the early 1990s "quickly became Mbeki's protege". Under Mbeki's tutorship, Gevisser continues, Manuel "wrested ANC economic policy away from a group of illustrious left-wing London academics who advocated for a strong state and inevitable deficit spending...". (A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, Palgrave Macmilan, 2009. p.249) According to Mbeki and his financial managers, GEAR - Manuel's emergency plan in the 1996 currency crisis - "staved off a crash that would have forced the country to take the begging bowl before the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." (p.342)
Vella Pillay - who had managed China's foreign currency reserves as assistant general manager of the Bank of China in London, and who had been tipped as the first ANC head of the Reserve Bank in South Africa - was the principal individual causualty of this abrupt policy reversal.
Pillay had been perhaps the first member of the SACP to go into exile in London, as early as 1949, when his marriage to a white fellow member of the SACP became illegal under the racist provisions of the Immorality Act of the new National Party regime, followed by study for a degree in international economics at the London School of Economics.