Shadow of Liberation. Vishnu Padayachee

based principally on his knowledge of coal mining in Britain rather than of South Africa (2010: 26). EROSA produced a number of papers on the South African economy, which (according to Ngoasheng 1992: 121) went beyond a critique into areas of policy recommendations. This included work on the minerals-energy complex, the savings-investment constraint and the nature of the South African financial system. The group related to the ANC in exile through Pillay, Sisulu and Jordan (IDRC 1991: 7).

      At the ANC economic policy conference in Harare in April–May 1990, Pillay presented a detailed paper on the essential steps in economic policy immediately upon the seizure of state power. He recommended a day-to-day agenda of the key steps that needed to be taken upon assumption of power. He was a strong opponent of the idea of granting the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) independence from the new government, arguing that this would seriously compromise the democratic state’s power to influence and shape a co-ordinated policy response to the economic legacy of apartheid.

      In a letter to his friend and comrade Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein, Pillay expressed grave concerns about the way the debate over economic policy was proceeding (we develop this point in chapter 4). He predicted that if the movement allowed itself to be seduced by South African and international capital to compromise on its economic policies, it would pay a high price one day. This long quote from that letter is worth setting out in full:

      What I find outrageous is the invidious position in which poor Nelson [Mandela] has been placed (by some of his colleagues) in having to frequently shift the movement’s economic goal posts. I know who is responsible for this: it found its most telling expression in Nelson’s unfortunate speech to businessmen on May 23 [1990]. I also feel that our friend JS [Joe Slovo] is perhaps showing a willingness to skate on very thin ice on these matters. I fear that the people in the townships, the rural areas and the unemployed – all of them may at some point react pretty strongly to what appear as deliberate ambiguities in the movement’s economic policies and programme. This is a serious worry for me. I had a long chat with Jay Naidoo of Cosatu [Congress of South African Trade Unions) last month: he expressed fears even more grave than I have had: he declared that the trade union movement will not allow any foot dragging on any of the key issues of economic policy (Letter from Vella Pillay to Rusty Bernstein, 14 June 1990, in Vella Pillay private archives).

      In the early 1990s, Vella was appointed director of the ANC’s Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG). Although he was the director and not an author or editor, he played a powerful role in shaping the ideas and policy framework behind the 1993 MERG report. Fine insists that the ANC could not have done better at that time than appoint him to that post:

      Well, for me, it seemed a very natural choice and I was very pleased. First of all, Vella had been in London in exile for many years and was a very accomplished and experienced economist. He was head of Foreign Exchange Reserves for the Bank of China and so there was probably no one better in the progressive movement who knew about how to manage foreign exchange reserves and issues involved in that. Laurence [Harris] and I also knew him very well because he’d done the MSc (Economics) of Birkbeck where we both taught, which was a university or a college of the University of London, specialising in teaching people at work, and so he did that part-time. He was also treasurer of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He’d also been on the board of the Industrial Wing of the Greater London Council … so his credentials for leading MERG were very strong. It probably also coincided with his ability to come back to South Africa, where of course he had very strong connections with the ANC leadership and he was a respected figure. I know he had a very close relationship with Mac Maharaj, but he seemed to have good connections with Mandela as well (Fine interview, 30 June 2015).

      Pillay continued to write and publish well into his eighties, including an important piece on monetary and exchange rate policy in the volume edited by Jonathan Michie and Vishnu Padayachee (1997: 101–124).

       Other developments in exile

      But Vella Pillay and his comrades at SOAS were not the only active members of the ANC in exile in London, when it came to matters of policy. Harold Wolpe and Norman Levy were deeply engaged in thinking about education policy through their work in London for the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania, though differences and tensions between London and Tanzania over educational policy were evident. Levy (2011) recalls that in the late 1980s the ANC held internal discussions in London on the ‘economy, health, the constitution and the agrarian situation’ and began to draw up ‘concrete policy documents’ on these topics. He himself undertook a profile of population, education, manpower distribution and skills training in South Africa, at the request of the ANC Research Unit headed by Pallo Jordan. ‘The report was intended to provide an overview of the labour market and an accurate picture of the racially skewed economy. This it did. But I am not sure that the study ever received the attention we expected once Mandela took office or whether a similar survey has since been undertaken’ (Levy 2011: 401).