Profile of Maria Ramos – South African Financial Sector Reformer

IMF has a nice profile of Maria Ramos. He led to the reforms of South Africa after the end of apartheid regime.

ECONOMIC policymaking is testing enough in today’s globalized world for those who are duly elected or appointed, and are supported by the accoutrements of office. But Maria Ramos started drafting macroeconomic policy options for South Africa in the 1980s while undercover as a member of a then illegal organization, traveling between continents with hidden briefing papers. It was just another stage in her preparations to serve in South Africa’s first majority government, which took office in 1994 facing the daunting task of reconciling the resources of a chronically weak economy with the expectant demands of the newly enfranchised.

Ramos joined the government a year after it gained power, when its drive to restore fiscal sustainability began to generate real friction from entrenched interest groups and big-spending ministries. First as deputy director-general for financial planning in the Finance Department, and then as director-general of the Treasury, Ramos’s studied practicality and penchant for detached analysis qualified her well for a role as a planner and ideas formulator for economic ministers sorely in need of workable options.

Earlier experience as a firebrand student and academic in South Africa’s liberal hothouse at the University of the Witwatersrand had laid Ramos’s solid political foundations as a supporter of and activist for majority rule. When these progressive instincts combined with her subsequent endeavors as a researcher and commercial bank economist, she embodied a formidable force that promised quick results for any enterprise intrepid enough to harness it. The African National Congress (ANC), as it formed South Africa’s first majority-rule government, assiduously tapped Ramos’s zeal.

Interesting throughout.