Ebrahim Patel (born 10 January 1962) is a South African politician and former trade unionist who represents the African National Congress. He served as the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition from 2019 to 2024 and as Minister of Economic Development from 2009 to 2019.
Raised in Cape Town, Patel rose to prominence in the trade union movement, notably as secretary-general of the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union from 1993 to 2009. In that capacity, he was labour convenor at the National Economic Development and Labour Council during the post-apartheid transition, as well as a member of the executive of the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
President Jacob Zuma appointed Patel to the cabinet after the April 2009 general election, and he was moved to the trade, industry and competition portfolio when President Cyril Ramaphosa created it in a ministerial merger in May 2019. Throughout his time in the cabinet, he was associated with the pursuit of localisation and industrialisation by means of industrial and sectoral planning. Both of his ministries rigorously applied public-interest provisions in South African competition law, frequently imposing developmental and social-responsibility conditions on private mergers, such as the 2011 acquisition of Massmart by Walmart. Though Patel is a self-proclaimed supporter of the entrepreneurial state and of public–private partnership, his critics objected to his interventionist impulses, which, along with his union background, gave him a reputation as a left-wing figure in the government.
Early life and activism Patel was born on 10 January 1962 in District Six in Cape Town. He grew up in Lansdowne and Grassy Park and was raised by a single mother, who was a garment worker. He became involved in political activism while at high school during the height of apartheid in the 1970s.
In 1980, he enrolled at the University of the Western Cape, where he continued his political organising – he was arrested and detained without charge on three separate occasions between 1980 and 1982. In 1982, he left the University of the Western Cape to take up a full-time position at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, an economics research institute at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He continued studying for his bachelor's degree part-time and graduated later from UCT.
Patel joined the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front in 1983, representing the Lotus River–Grassy Park area, and he was active in related civic organisations, including the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee. However, his foremost political engagement was through the burgeoning trade union movement. Having been involved in supporting strikes during his earlier years as a student, he helped unionise university employees in the Cape Province while he was at UCT; in 1985, he was elected as the inaugural general secretary of the university union that was established as part of the initiative. Also in 1985, he took part in the meetings that led to the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which went on to play a central role in opposition to apartheid.
Clothing and textile unions: 1986–2009 In 1986, Patel became a full-time organiser for the National Union of Textile Workers, a large Cosatu affiliate which ultimately became the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (SACTWU). He deputised Johnny Copelyn as SACTWU's assistant secretary-general until 1993, when he was elected to succeed Copelyn as secretary-general.
According to Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, "His strategy for the clothing sector became the model for labour market and industrial policy generally." Particularly influential was SACTWU's decision, under Patel, to pursue the development of a lucrative investment wing. Through chief executive Johnny Copelyn, SACTWU obtained a large stake in Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI), which became a multi-billion-rand company; unlike Copelyn, Patel did not personally obtain shares in HCI.
More broadly, Patel "exerted considerable influence" while at SACTWU, both as a member of Cosatu's central executive committee and through various corporatist forums and public bodies. After Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Patel was a member of the trade union delegation that welcomed him at his home in Soweto, and in subsequent years, as South Africa's democratic transition progressed, he remained involved in social and policy debate. He was centrally involved in the establishment of the National Economic Forum – for dialogue between business, labour, and government – and he later became the overall convenor for labour on the forum's successor body, the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC). In this capacity, Patel helped draft several key agreements and laws; in particular, he has been described as a "key architect" of the Labour Relations Act of 1995. He was also appointed by President Mandela to the inaugural Financial and Fiscal Commission, and he was the chief negotiator for the Framework Agreement on HIV/AIDS in 2002 to 2003 and for the National Textile Bargaining Council in 2003.
In the international arena, Patel was a longstanding member of the Workers' Group of the governing body of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and he served as the group's global spokesperson on employment and social policy. He was also involved in negotiating and drafting several ILO policy documents. According to Nattrass and Seekings, he "helped to bring the ILO’s ideology of 'decent work', with modifications, to South Africa."
Minister of Economic Development: 2009–2019 In the immediate aftermath of the 2009 general election, the Mail & Guardian reported that Cosatu had asked newly elected President Jacob Zuma to appoint Patel as a cabinet minister, in order to increase the union's representation in government. When Zuma announced his cabinet the following week, on 10 May, Patel was appointed to a newly created portfolio as Minister of Economic Development. In order to take up the ministerial position, he vacated his SACTWU office and was succeeded by his former deputy, André Kriel.
Patel was Minister of Economic Development throughout Zuma's two terms as president, and he was retained in the cabinet of President Cyril Ramaphosa, who replaced Zuma in February 2018. In addition, in the 2014 general election, he joined the National Assembly as a representative of the African National Congress (ANC).
Government politics
Ministerial mandate Patel's ministerial tenure began with a series of media reports pointing to tension in the cabinet, the result of the unclear mandate and jurisdiction of Patel's newly created ministry. In particular, he reportedly clashed with Trevor Manuel, Zuma's Minister in the Presidency with responsibility for national planning. Leftists in the Tripartite Alliance apparently wanted Patel, rather than Manuel, to be appointed at the head of the National Planning Commission. In addition, tensions apparently arose because Patel publicly asserted authority over "micro- and macroeconomic development planning", a function that the Public Finance Management Act delegated to Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.
According to the Mail & Guardian, the tensions were partly reflective of "the larger battle over South Africa’s economic policy direction". Because of his union associations, Patel was viewed as a representative of the left in the cabinet; indeed, he was sometimes wrongly identified as a senior member of the South African Communist Party, though in fact he had never been a member. In this perspective, Patel's leftist affiliation set him apart from – and in competition with – moderate figures such as Manuel, Gordhan, and their respective supporters.
Officials inside the government said that Patel would be responsible for "broad-brush economic development planning", providing long-term strategic input into the national economic policy developed and implemented by the National Treasury. However, at the end of Zuma's first term in 2014, the Mail & Guardian observed that Patel still had "one marked flaw: nobody knows what he does."
Canyon Springs inquiry In December 2011, Patel's deputy, former trade unionist Enoch Godongwana, resigned from the ministry amid the scandal surrounding an inquiry into the liquidation of Canyon Springs, a private investment company that was half-owned by Godongwana's family trust and of which Godongwana was a former director. SACTWU had pursued the inquiry on the basis that several hundred-million rands in SACTWU pension funds had been invested in Canyon Springs and subsequently lost, amid alleged embezzlement and fraud. Because he had been general-secretary of the union at the time the investment was made, Patel was initially summoned to testify at the inquiry, though he was later excused.
Patel said that he had no knowledge of or authority over SACWTU's provident investments (which were managed by trustees, rather than union officials), and Godongwana denied that his resignation was related to the scandal, but the Mail & Guardian nonetheless said that the saga had damaged the reputation of Patel's department.
Response to state capture Patel's term as Minister of Economic Development coincided with alleged state capture of the Zuma administration by sectional interests, and in particular by Zuma's allies in the Gupta family. In the Financial Mail's phrase, Patel "toed the party line in supporting Zuma" during his presidency. Indeed, Zuma reportedly held Patel in high regard. However, Patel spoke out against the "high levels of corruption in our ranks" as early as May 2016. In addition, in a move viewed by some observers as daring, in September 2017 – while Zuma was still president – he released a report which estimated that corruption cost the South African economy as much as R27 billion annually.
Patel's ministry was also among the first to take action to review Gupta-associated projects. In November 2017, Patel told Parliament that his ministry intended to sue Oakbay Resources and Energy, a Gupta-linked firm, to recover an amount of R293 million loaned to Oakbay by the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) in earlier years. In addition, in response to the controversy around the Oakbay loan, Patel instructed the IDC to publish a list of all politically exposed recipients of developmental finance, aiming to increase transparency.
New Growth Path In November 2010, in the wake of a global economic crisis, Patel published the New Growth Path, a policy framework which set out an expanded role for the state in job creation. The framework set a highly ambitious target: the creation of five million jobs over the next decade, to be achieved through a mixture of macroeconomic and microeconomic "job drivers". Among other things, the plan proposed a broad wage accord between business and labour, inflation-linked salary caps, looser monetary policy, and investments by pension funds in developmental projects. Some commentators observed a disconnect between Patel's plan and the policy and budget of the National Treasury; for example, the New Growth Path omitted mention of the R6 billion in youth employment subsidies proposed by the Treasury. Major South African trade association Business Unity South Africa disagreed with the job-creation target, criticised the government for "too much talk and little action" in various competing economic policy initiatives, and published a host of counter-proposals.