On the Brink: SA's political and fiscal cliff-hanger

ON THE BRINK

SOUTH AFRICA’S POLITICAL

AND FISCAL CLIFF-HANGER

CLAIRE BISSEKER

Tafelberg

To my darling Ashley,

in eager anticipation of your own first book

‘Same old human story

The saddest winds do blow

While we’re trapped in the language of dark history

Underneath a human rainbow’

– Johnny Clegg

Foreword

Claire Bisseker’s On the Brink: South Africa’s Political and Fiscal Cliff-hanger is a very timeous contribution to our national debate.

As Professor Adam Habib says in a passage cited in this book, our economic discourse has taken the shape of a binary adherence to a belief in the free market (and a rigid adherence to the mechanisms thereof) versus a retreat to 1960s Soviet economics, in which nationalisation of industry is seen as a panacea for the economic problems of a developing country. The fact that these are the two dominant models in which South African economic debate now takes place reveals the very poverty of thinking about so vital a national problem.

This book, in clear and concise terms, reflects upon how we have come to this pass and why these two strains of economics are now hegemonic within our public life. As Bisseker shows, this situation is particularly depressing, in that the democratic government after 1994 rose to the extraordinary challenges that had been posed as a result of the mismanagement of the economy by the apartheid government, as well as the levels of corruption and unaccountability that characterised political life prior to 1994.

For example, under the leadership of Trevor Manuel, the debt-to-GDP ratio was halved from over 50% and the country’s finances stabilised. Absent this achievement, interest on debt would have overwhelmed any capacity of the state for reconstruction. Manifestly, this achievement alone was insufficient to solve 300 years of gross exploitation and the racially skewed economy produced thereby.

Hence, the problem that now confronts the country has been its inability to develop a meaningful programme of reconstruction of the economy, which would make 50 million South Africans economic citizens (as opposed to simply political citizens) – and this all within the context of globalisation.

In summary, neither a myopic free-enterprise approach nor a return to the kind of Soviet economics that had such disastrous consequences more recently in Venezuela can solve the fundamental problem: meaningfully growing an economy that benefits all who live in it.

There can be no doubt that perpetuating the profound inequalities of South Africa and the degrading daily reality that confronts historically disadvantaged communities of millions of people (who, sadly, remain presently disadvantaged) is not only immoral, but also unsustainable in the long run if our democratic enterprise is to attain permanent traction.

This book provides an opportunity for deep reflection on these realities and the consequent need to think laterally towards the creation of economic policies that will benefit all in a meaningful fashion rather than just a few.

The task is not to ensure that the demography of the ownership of the economy changes from a few whites to a few black capitalists alone but rather that the levels of inequality and poverty that characterise today’s South Africa are radically transformed, so that we can then truly say South Africa belongs to every single person who lives in this country.

For this reason, this book comes at a most propitious time in our history as we are enjoined to move beyond populist slogans and instead debate how to grow the economy significantly, that is to the 4% to 5% GDP growth rates as promised in the National Development Plan – an achievement that would simultaneously provide a truly meaningful economic stake for all 50 million South Africans.

Judge Dennis Davis

Preface and acknowledgements

I don’t remember much about my interview for a job at the Financial Mail in Cape Town 20-odd years ago, but I do remember the then editor, Nigel Bruce, asking me what the country’s number one economic problem was. Unbeknown to Bruce, there was an illustrated cover of a recent copy of the Financial Mail on the wall behind him. It showed South Africa’s finance minister at the time, Chris Liebenberg, being carted skywards in a hot-air balloon under a headline that suggested that inflation was South Africa’s number one problem.

Still, I answered: ‘Unemployment!’

‘No!’ said Bruce, ‘Inflation!’

I got the job anyway (clinched by my willingness to work for peanuts), but I’m still surprised when the universe tries to nudge me in the right direction, like it did that day. Two years ago, Tafelberg’s Erika Oosthuizen gave me a similar prod when she suggested I write a book exploring whether South Africa was going to go over the fiscal cliff. I demurred, having three kids and a full-time job, but she had planted a seed and when I was subsequently granted a few months of unexpected long-service leave, I took up the challenge.

This book is written in the style of a Financial Mail cover story, which makes it essentially a work of journalism. It contains lots of reportage and direct quotes, but plenty of analysis and opinion too. It’s a style that takes the nub of academic research and blends it with direct interviews with the researchers themselves to make the technical insights come alive on the page. It means that when the author’s opinion is delivered, it comes bolstered by fact, making it that much more persuasive.

Journalist turned author Malcolm Gladwell uses a similar technique in his best-selling books. Like Gladwell, I also cut my teeth as a science writer, which probably explains my attachment to academic research and the pleasure I get from making it accessible to readers.

I would have valued a book like On the Brink when I was an economics student at university. I hope it will help readers make sense of South Africa’s economic decline over the past five years and the country’s failure to get on top of its most pressing problems – unemployment, poverty and inequality. It should leave them with the understanding that these challenges, deep-seated and complex as they are, are not insurmountable with the right economic policies. Therefore, it’s not just a matter of time before South Africa becomes a failed state, though we are skating very close to the edge.

This book would have been impossible to write without the backing of the Financial Mail, which gave me not only time off to write it, but also permission to quote from the publication’s articles. These form the backbone of this narrative. Thanks especially to the editor, Rob Rose, who also generously agreed to write the superb chapter on state capture, despite the many other pressing demands on his time.

Over the past year, I have done more than 15 dedicated interviews for this book. The most substantial were those with Trevor Manuel, Nhlanhla Nene, Lungisa Fuzile, Michael Spicer, Adrian Gore, Nic Borain, Justin Barnes, Rian le Roux and Iraj Abedian. Several other economists have been unstinting in sharing their technical expertise over many years, including Sanlam’s Arthur Kamp, Rand Merchant Bank’s Ettienne le Roux and Deutsche Bank’s Danelee Masia, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Economists tend to get a bad rap for practising their dismal science but I have found them to be consistently the most lucid and perceptive commentators on South Africa’s condition. The last time they were this worried about the state of the economy was during the global financial crisis of 2009.

Trying to predict the end game now, in June 2017, before the ANC’s policy conference, the parliamentary vote of no confidence in Zuma, or the crucial December ANC elective conference is fraught with peril. Zuma has dug in, seemingly impervious to the revelations emerging daily from the Gupta email cache, though the careers of Brian Molefe, Ben Ngubane and Hlaudi Motsoeneng have all bitten the dust in recent days. More dominoes will fall before the end.

Right now it feels as though the country could go either way. It teeters on the brink of making a calamitous mistake. I fear that it will end badly but hope that sense will prevail. Certainly, the economy is in a dangerous downward spiral and only an extraordinary political resolution will be able to change its trajectory.

‘I’m sure our children will say that these 30 years we went through hell,’ said Iraj Abedian in one of my earliest interviews for this book. I was shocked to think that it could take 30 years for South Africa to hit rock bottom and then to repair all the damage of the Zuma years. What happens in the next few months will determine the kind of country we bequeath to our children. It is that simple and that terrifying.

Thanks are also due to Gill Moodie, my enthusiastic publisher, who bolstered my flagging spirits more than once, Mark Ronan for his expert editing skills, and my beloved family, who allowed me to neglect them while I spent weekends at my computer in the race to finish on time.

I still love working for the Financial Mail, having survived six editors. And even though I now work alone from a study at the bottom of my Franschhoek garden, the satisfaction of filing a well-told story remains just as sweet as it was when I started. (The salary is still peanuts.)

Introduction

Few countries in transition have managed to get a grip on their public finances as well as South Africa did after attaining democracy in 1994. The speed with which South Africa achieved fiscal stability earned the young democracy international plaudits and, over time, this feat was recognised by successive sovereign credit-rating upgrades.

Now, just over 20 years later, as South Africa comes to terms with having been downgraded to junk status, much of that fiscal progress has been wiped out. This is mainly because of years of unsustainable spending on a burgeoning but unproductive government in a low-growth environment.

In early 2013, I began asking whether South Africa was on a slippery slope to becoming a sub-investment-grade country. My conclusion was that although it would take a significant deterioration over several years for South Africa to lose its investment-grade credit rating, it was likely that, on current policies, the country’s creditworthiness would keep deteriorating.

It was clear even then, before most people had heard about the Guptas and before the term ‘state capture’ had become part of the local lexicon, that unless South Africa found a way to accelerate growth and make it more labour-intensive, the country faced a slow, grinding descent from mediocrity to marginalisation – or worse.

But, over the past five years, South Africa’s economic deterioration has been far more rapid than I and many other doomsayers initially envisaged. This was partly because the country’s slide was hastened by factors beyond its control, most significantly the slowdown in China and with it the collapse in the prices of and demand for South Africa’s commodity exports.

Though the external environment has been extremely chal­lenging, domestic factors have weighed even more heavily on the South African economy. In addition to the cyclical commodity shock, South Africa has endured an electricity supply and price shock, a labour shock (in the form of the Marikana massacre and the five-month platinum strike) and, to top it all, in 2016, the worst drought in living memory.

But, in the end, it was the deep, structurally embedded weak­nesses and trends – the deterioration of South Africa’s public finances and state capacity, extreme policy uncertainty and political contestation, fraught labour relations, skills shortages, and high logistics and mounting energy costs – that cemented the downward slide in economic activity and the country’s credit ratings.

It was sadly predictable. Predictable, because a government that failed even to acknowledge these home-grown problems would also most likely fail to act on them until it was too late.

What I didn’t count on was that in addition to the government’s neglect of the economy, President Jacob Zuma and his acolytes would actively sabotage it through a web of institutionalised theft. In the process, key ministries and state-owned companies have been captured and hollowed out, severely compromising the state’s capacity to deliver on its developmental agenda. In many respects, the state has gone rogue.

The fear that things had deteriorated so massively that the country was close to falling over a fiscal cliff took hold during the latter part of 2015. In fact, the alarming prospect that South Africa might be headed for a debt trap was the initial impetus for this book.

The health of a country’s public finances matters not just because this is something credit-rating agencies look at in determining a country’s creditworthiness and, therefore, the cost of borrowing. Rather it is because high and rising debt crowds out essential government spending, whether on economic infrastructure or on pro-poor programmes. In South Africa’s case, keeping the R180 billion social-grant system growing in line with inflation is essential for keeping 17 million beneficiaries out of dire poverty and maintaining social stability, though it is no substitute for employment.

Fiscally, South Africa is testing its limits. The government has no further ammunition left with which to alleviate poverty or to stimulate the economy. It’s at the point where further tax hikes risk strangling growth, which would be self-defeating, where cutting expenditure risks harming service delivery, given that two-thirds of the budget is devoted to social spending, and where rooting out corruption appears impossible while Zuma or his proxy is head of state.

Though further fiscal tightening will have an increasingly dampening effect on economic activity, the consequences of not acting – a further loss of confidence and multiple rating downgrades – would probably be worse.

While Pravin Gordhan was finance minister, it was taken for granted that the country would avoid a fiscal crisis. This was a naive assumption. The Treasury understood that public expenditure was too high given the risks building in the fiscal system and was taking steps to restore the country to fiscal sustainability. But the real problem was that growth had been too low for too long. Though one man should have been powerless in the face of this problem, Gordhan inspired such confidence that in the end he was all that stood between South Africa and a junk rating.

His replacement with a fiscal-policy novice, Malusi Gigaba, in March 2017 thus came at a dangerous time for the economy. Gigaba spent his first few weeks flip-flopping between accusing the Treasury of being captured by ‘white monopoly capital’ and praising its professionalism. Nor could he decide between Zuma’s war cry of ‘radical economic transformation’ and Gordhan’s vision of ‘inclusive growth’. In the end, Gigaba declared that the two policies were essentially the same thing, revealing not so much his real opinion as the untenable situation that Zuma had placed the country in.

In its muddled thinking, the country has come full circle back to where it was in 2012 when the government tried to pretend that the irreconcilable New Growth Path (NGP) and the National Development Plan (NDP) were essentially the same thing. The upshot of that conflict was that for the next five years South Africa implemented no discernible growth policy at all.

As long as this kind of ambivalence prevails at the top of government, South Africa will keep bleeding skills, jobs and capital until the country is just a shadow of itself. From a peak of 3,5% in 2011, South Africa’s economic growth rate had slowed to a mere 0,3% by 2016. Most economists expect growth to climb gradually to reach 2% over the next three to five years. But with the population growing by just under 1,7% a year, muddling along with very low or stagnant growth means the average South African is likely to experience very little income growth up until 2022.

There are huge dangers in this. Rising poverty and unem­ployment are likely to heighten social and fiscal tensions. It is the kind of climate in which populism flourishes and confidence withers. The political noise is already deafening, with much of the blame misdirected at whites, business and capitalism for the government’s failure to meet people’s expectations.

Tragically, the pragmatic NDP – which makes faster growth and job creation South Africa’s overarching national goal – now stands discredited along with capitalism in the minds of angry, young activists for having failed to deliver either growth or transformation. It is also disqualified in their minds for its association with men like Trevor Manuel and Gordhan (who, for their adherence to orthodox economic policies, have supposedly sold their souls to ‘white monopoly capital’ and betrayed the national democratic revolution).

Such is the desire for renewal that there is every chance that on Zuma’s exit, whether before the 2019 election or after, South Africa will embark on another protracted detour in search of consensus solutions on how to run the economy regardless of who replaces him. But the solutions to South Africa’s economic decline are no mystery. They have been tried and tested in other countries. Many of them have appeared in various iterations of South Africa’s own economic policies over the years. What the country has not done is actually implement them.

To implement any development plan requires a capable, accountable state, unifying leadership and someone to champion reform at the highest level of government. South Africa has lacked all these ingredients. And though Gordhan championed the NDP and made every effort to partner with business to get growth going, he was thrown to the wolves. With him went the country’s credit ratings.

South Africa can devise a new plan if it must (it would be its fourth in a decade), but until the government can actually land it throughout society and use it to remove the key impediments to growth, the economy will remain trapped beneath a 2% ceiling. The longer South Africa debates the problem, the longer it will remain trapped, and the further it will be left behind.

Politically, South Africa’s future is impossible to call, since many plausible outcomes can be imagined. But for the economy, the future really is binary. Only two outcomes are really possible – a good one or a bad one – because if the economy is not moving forward convincingly, it is in decline. With the right leadership and economic policies, the country could take off. With the wrong ones, it will continue its descent. That descent could be rapid, if the ANC tacks left towards more populist policies, or gradual, if policy confusion and inertia continue to frustrate growth.

With the country living dangerously, South Africa needs more than ever for wise heads to prevail. Gigaba is unlikely to surprise everyone by rising to the challenge of his portfolio, though there remains an outside chance of this. Zuma is deeply entrenched but his corrupt faction may yet be swept out of power on the rising tide of South Africa’s anger. In every facet of public life, people are standing up to his gangster regime. The courts, especially, have inflicted heavy losses on Zuma’s push for untrammelled power.

Though Zuma would leave behind a ravaged state, better people would be attracted to the multi-year task of rebuilding the country’s institutions and they would build them stronger than before, knowing now the forces they might need to again withstand one day.

South Africa stands on the brink of a political and fiscal cliff. The period ahead is going to be nail-biting with the dial on the nation’s psyche likely to swing from despair to euphoria and back again several times before it is all over. Many of the ingredients for a catastrophic collapse are already present, but South Africa has pulled back from the brink before. There is every reason to believe it will find the national cohesion and resolve to do so again.

PART 1

A Political Overview

1 #ZumaMustFall

‘The National Treasury held the line on everything; we had to park some projects that couldn’t be executed. … those things might not have gone down well with all of my colleagues. No one was happy.’

– Nhlanhla Nene

South Africa’s jilted former finance ministers Nhlanhla Nene and Pravin Gordhan are sitting on a bench on a farmhouse veranda in the little village of Kranskop, which lies on the edge of the Tugela River Valley in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. They are watching Nene’s cattle wander up from the river to graze on leftover bean stalks below the house.

Gordhan turns to Nene and says, ‘Now I can see why you always come back to work so refreshed on a Monday morning.’

Back in that bucolic moment the colleagues could scarcely have imagined the assault on the National Treasury that lay ahead and how it would result in both of them being axed within months of each other, ultimately causing the economy to be junk-rated and growth to flat-line.

President Jacob Zuma’s act of summarily dismissing Nene, a highly competent finance minister, on 9 December 2015 without informing the rest of his cabinet or the top echelons of the ANC, but with the apparent knowledge of his friends, Atul and Ajay Gupta, has been dubbed ‘Nenegate’ or ‘9/12’.

The event shook South Africa to the rafters. Not only did it take government’s mismanagement of the economy to a whole new level, but it also set in motion a chain of events that cleaved the ANC into two opposing factions and blew the lid off the murky world of state capture by providing first-hand evidence of the extent of the Guptas’ influence.

The steep drop in the rand,¹ a spike in bond yields and the sharp fall in the JSE All-Share Index in the days immediately after Nene’s axing revealed the investment community’s horror at his dismissal. The public was equally dismayed: #ZumaMustFall was the top-trending Twitter hashtag in South Africa; talk shows were flooded with calls for Zuma to resign.

The fact that the consumer-confidence index, released the same day, collapsed to –14 index points, approaching levels not seen since 1986, added to the sense that the economy had suffered one too many blows.

It had been evident to the media weeks before that the knives were out for the National Treasury, and Nene in particular. The story that he would be fired and offered a job at the new Brics Bank as political cover was leaked to the press at least three weeks before 9 December. Nene was aware of these reports but said he ‘didn’t take them seriously’.²

He initially laughed off the astounding revelation by his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas, that members of the Gupta family had offered Jonas the post of finance minister – dismissing the Guptas as ‘chancers trying their luck’.

The South African public were deeply shocked. For if it was true that the Guptas were peddling cabinet posts around town, it meant that Saxonwold, not Pretoria, was really running the government, and that South Africa had truly descended into a gangster state.

As Jonas noted in a subsequent press statement, asserting that he had rejected the Guptas out of hand, ‘The basis of my rejection of their offer is that it makes a mockery of our hard-earned democracy, the trust of our people and [the fact that] no one apart from the president of the republic appoints ministers.’³

Later Jonas told the Public Protector that he had been offered R600 000 in cash by the Guptas to be finance minister, together with the promise of a further R600 million over time.

After Jonas spoke out, other revelations began to snowball. Former ANC MP Vygie Mentor claimed that the Guptas had offered her the post of Minister of Public Service and Administration to replace Barbara Hogan – provided she awarded them the flight route between South Africa and India. Hogan later claimed that the Guptas had also attempted to influence her decision-making. Mentor subsequently laid formal charges of corruption against the government and the Gupta family with the police. This gave South Africa another scandal – ‘Guptagate’ or ‘Zuptagate’ – to add to its inglorious trophy cabinet.

The impression that Nene’s dismissal was part of an orchestrated plot to capture the National Treasury was corroborated by Zuma’s choice of ANC MP David Des van Rooyen as a replacement finance minister. This former small-town mayor, with no fiscal or national-government experience, arrived at the Treasury with two little-known advisors (Ian Whitley and Mohamed Bobat) in tow, promising to make the Treasury ‘more accessible’ once he was installed.

Lungisa Fuzile – who served as the director-general to four consecutive finance ministers, Trevor Manuel, Nene, Gordhan and, more recently, Malusi Gigaba before his resignation – recalls that December weekend with the new incumbents as the ‘lowest of low points’ in his 19 years at the Treasury.

Bobat displayed such ‘impoliteness’ and disdain for how the Treasury operated that Fuzile was enraged. ‘I suspect that had that weekend not turned out the way it did, we would’ve ended up coming to blows,’ he said.⁴

It subsequently emerged from the Public Protector’s State of Capture report that Van Rooyen had visited the Guptas’ Saxonwold compound for seven straight days before his appointment. Various media reports also linked Whitley and Bobat to the Guptas, and they were subsequently accused of having allegedly leaked internal Treasury documents to close associates of the family.⁵

Besides the political machinations, Nenegate is estimated to have cost the country about R500 billion, including the R95 billion loss suffered on the markets by the Government Employees’ Pension Fund in the immediate aftermath.

‘I was truly overwhelmed and truly, truly humbled by the market reaction because I didn’t expect it,’ said Nene. ‘I still believe that it had everything to do with the National Treasury as an institution, so I didn’t take it personally.’

Nene seems to harbour no anger or bitterness over being dismissed so suddenly without any apparent cause, despite having served the Treasury with distinction for seven years. The accepted narrative behind his dismissal is that he must have drawn a line very firmly in the sand in his dealings with Zuma in the run-up to being axed – perhaps by insisting on fiscal responsibility at technically bankrupt South African Airways (SAA) or by demanding transparency in the costing of the state’s highly controversial 9 600 MW nuclear programme. But Nene doesn’t believe he was fired for being an obstacle or an irritant to the president on either of those issues, or for any other specific act or omission.

He says fiscal discipline was ‘the name of the game’ for the entire time that he served at the National Treasury. ‘The Treasury held the line on everything and said no where it needed to say no. It wouldn’t be correct to say there were things which only affected the president,’ he explained.

‘What I know is that we were on a shoestring budget and it was clear that we had to pursue the fiscal consolidation path with vigour and reduce unnecessary expenditure. That meant we had to park some projects that couldn’t be executed. All of those things might not have gone down well with all of my colleagues. No one was happy,’ said Nene of the run-up to that fateful December day.

This confirms the general perception of society at large that the reason Nene was fired was for doing his job, for insisting on fiscal discipline.

‘Being a finance minister is an impossible task,’ said Professor Emeritus Estian Calitz of Stellenbosch University. ‘It’s a systemic thing because he’s exposed to all the ministers in the cabinet and the job of each minister is to maximise the budget for their department. Unless you have this umbilical cord between the finance minister and the head of government – like we had with Manuel and Mbeki – the finance minister is a very lonely figure.’⁶

In short, to function successfully, the finance minister has to have the backing of the president. One of the stand-out features of South Africa’s political economy during the Mandela and Mbeki years was the firm support that the country’s macroeconomic policies enjoyed from the top. During Zuma’s first term (2009 to 2014), things continued in very much the same way. However, once growth began to hit the skids during Zuma’s second term, that support began to evaporate.

With the economic slowdown necessitating tough trade-offs to fund new priorities or expand existing programmes, the tighter stance on fiscal policy was becoming increasingly ‘unpalatable’ to the ANC government, explained Fuzile.

‘The success of the National Treasury or the finance minister at times like that depends on continued, unwavering support from the top,’ he added. ‘Instead, there was mild support, mild to cold support, for some of the tough decisions that had to be taken. At best you could say we had limited support from the top and divided support from the rest of the cabinet.’⁷

It had long been apparent that elements in the ANC were uncomfortable having an economic tsar in the National Treasury who stood above everyone with his hand firmly on the budget. That Nene was forced by the country’s worsening fiscal trajectory to tighten the reins on spending ever more forcefully had clearly made him few friends in the cabinet. The unhappiness this created added fuel to the arguments of those eager to downgrade the position of finance minister, so that the president and his close cabinet allies could drive the budget process instead.

Nene was the first finance minister to be fired by an ANC government since the dawn of democracy in 1994. The timing was also critical, coming just weeks after S&P Global Ratings had changed the outlook on South Africa’s sovereign credit rating to negative. With South Africa already rated BBB– (i.e. on the bottom rung of the investment-grade ladder), it was clear that any further fiscal slippage or deterioration in the country’s institutional strength would be likely to tip South Africa over the edge into junk status.

That Zuma would shoot South Africa in the foot deliberately by placing the rent-seeking interests of his acolytes over the needs of an economy teetering on the brink of a downgrade was deeply worrying. It meant that the president either had no concept of the vulnerable position South Africa was in as a recently downgraded, twin-deficit emerging-market country or that he simply didn’t care. Either way, the sense was that Zuma had well and truly crossed the line.

Under pressure from the markets, banking CEOs and other captains of industry, as well as from within his own party, Zuma back-tracked and by Sunday evening, four days after he had fired Nene, he had reappointed the well-respected Pravin Gordhan (South Africa’s finance minister from 2009 to 2014) to the hot seat.

South Africa had gone through the ignominy of three finance ministers in five days. Van Rooyen lasted little more than a weekend, earning him the unflattering moniker ‘weekend special’.

When the markets opened on Monday morning, the rand started to recover some of its losses but it was subsequently clear that investor confidence in South Africa had taken a severe knock and would not be easily regained.⁸

Nene’s dismissal had been a rude wake-up call for the investment community, which, until then, hadn’t acknowledged the ‘voracious criminal conspiracy’ that had state spending by the throat, the generalised looting that was occurring, or the fact that South Africa’s democratic project had been hijacked by a Gupta/Zuma/Premier League set of interests, said political analyst Nic Borain.⁹

At the time, there was speculation that Zuma may have recanted immediately after Nene’s axing and asked him to resume his duties. Nene denied this. He also ruled out the possibility of taking a government job at ministerial level in some future administration. ‘I’ve