Mboweni ‘at centre of Cuba donation’

It was former finance minister Tito Mboweni who proposed that SA support Cuba with long-term aid in light of “testy relations” with the US, court documents show. Mboweni’s proposal that SA should help Cuba with aid over several years emerged in a letter raised in a court case about a R50m donation to Cuba.

It was former finance minister Tito Mboweni who proposed that SA financially support Cuba with long-term aid in light of “testy relations” with the US, court documents show.

Mboweni’s proposal that SA’s cabinet should help Cuba with annual aid over several years emerged in a letter raised in a court case about a R50m donation from SA to Cuba.

His proposal came in response to a letter from international relations minister Naledi Pandor, who needed his endorsement in addition to hers so that SA could help Cuba.

The country’s ambassador to SA wrote to Pandor asking for help in mid-2020, when SA was in the first months of a hard lockdown to counter the coronavirus pandemic

Mboweni has since resigned from the cabinet and parliament and is now a regional adviser at global investment banking, securities and investment management firm Goldman Sachs.

On Tuesday, an urgent interdict handed down in the Pretoria high court brought to a temporary halt the plan to give tens of millions in humanitarian support to Cuba.

The successful applicant, AfriForum, has been granted 20 days to serve an ensuing review application on Pandor and several other respondents, including the international relations department and the National Treasury.

AfriForum campaign manager Reiner Duvenage welcomed the decision to stop “this unlawful and shameful donation” from SA to Cuba. “We are optimistic that our review application will succeed,” he said.

Pandor’s spokesperson Lunga Ngqengelele told Business Day: “We are still studying the judgment and we will be advised accordingly on the way forward.”

AfriForum, a self-defined civil rights group and registered nonprofit organisation, took the government to court over the promised help to Cuba after news of the multimillion-rand pledge stoked outrage.

In early February, deputy international relations minister Alvin Botes told parliament’s international relations committee the donation would alleviate food struggles caused by “extraterritory sanctions that have been levelled against the people of Cuba by the US”. In July 2020, Cuba’s ambassador to SA, Rodolfo Version, wrote a formal letter to Pandor, asking for food and medical supplies.

Pandor wrote to then finance minister Mboweni, citing the “crippling US blockade” and Covid-19 as factors worsening Cuba’s economic crisis. She asked Mboweni to agree on sending “urgent humanitarian assistance” to Cuba, which he did before going a step further.

“All this high-level proposal must obviously take into account SA’s very constrained fiscal position and also the testy relations between Cuba and the US,” he wrote.

When asked about it in February, Pandor said SA responded “in the context of reciprocity and its historical friendship and solidarity with Cuba”, including during the antiapartheid struggle.

Judge Brenda Neukircher heard arguments in AfriForum’s urgent interdict application last week in the high court in Pretoria.

She wrote that the basis of AfriForum’s application against the donation “is the unassailable fact that the SA economy is struggling”, with the government in substantial debt and supporting millions of poor people through social grants.

Neukircher found AfriForum met the legal requirements for an urgent interdict pending the intended review application, and she was persuaded that irreparable harm would occur without it.

To her, AfriForum showed Mboweni was aware of SA’s constrained fiscal position when he agreed with Pandor to back the pledge. She noted the matter concerned “substantial funds […] in anyone’s books” and the respondents gave no indication SA would ever recover the funds since the R50m was not a loan and would be given in the form of goods — food and medical supplies.

Neukircher instructed the respondents to pay costs because “AfriForum represents the interests of the broad SA public” and should not be out of pocket.

She recorded that her findings would not bind the court from hearing the intended review and “it may well be argued that the case made out by AfriForum is somewhat tenuous”, but it had met the legal threshold for an urgent interdict.