FINANCE Minister Pravin Gordhan has in the minds of cogent South Africans established himself as a bit of a hero. Thus elevated, it is difficult to admit that we have been wrong all along. But we must.

When Gordhan rode to the rescue of the rand and the economy when he was reappointed as finance minister, the relief that the Treasury escaped capture by President Jacob Zuma’s cabal was so great that it obscured the fact that Zuma was the apparatchik who appointed Gordhan. It gave everyone invested in the country’s growth prospects the sense that their arguments for prudence had reached receptive minds, that an uncomfortable compromise had been reached, that somewhere in a sober meeting, a decision had been reached to do the right thing.

That is the sense that kept the world trading in South African paper, to take us at our word, to weigh the odds in our favour. The sane and the prudent have granted themselves several rounds of backslapping as SA avoided its sovereign credit being downgraded to junk status by the leading ratings agencies, pinning their hopes on the one man in the government whom they regard able at least to read a balance sheet.

It was inevitable that the investigation by the Hawks police unit into the establishment of a supposedly rogue investigative unit under Gordhan’s command as commissioner of the South African Revenue Service would cast him as a true and selfless public servant. Gordhan’s heroic status was confirmed by his statement that “the Hawks and those who instruct them have no regard for the economic and social welfare of millions (of South Africans)”.

That’s what we’d like to hear, but it disregards the fact that Gordhan is a loyal member of an ANC government that has created the economic and social mess in which we find ourselves.

The supposed split along an ANC fault line defined by Gordhan-Zuma poles is wishful thinking among those who would see the party falter on policy issues. The spate of factionalism in the party has nothing to do with flawed policies. It is about the proximity to power and the distance from a spent force.

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Gordhan is not the exemplary bureaucrat we have come to think he is.

If, as an ethical chief financial officer, Gordhan had any regard for the economic and social welfare of South Africans, he would have demanded drastic changes in government policy away from the ANC’s obsessive dirigisme towards freedom. Instead of blocking the feeding of South African Airways’ insatiable maw, he would have insisted on its privatisation. We hear nothing from Gordhan about the nationalisation of land under the obscenely expensive guise of land reform. He has yet to tear into Eskom and Transnet’s flawed monopolistic business models as a proper bean counter should.

Now, reports Times Media’s Penwell Dlamini, Gordhan has urged business leaders to stop drawing attention only to what is going wrong in the country’s economy, and that one of the constraints to growth is the constant focus on what is going wrong in the country.

“In my organisation‚” he says, “we are pointing at what we have done and not what is missing. We also talk about how we will compensate for what is missing.”

While that is all very well in the pop psychology we use to get us through the day, it will do naught to get the snouts out of the trough. It is the type of thing the SABC’s Hlaudi Motsoeneng would say.

To Gordhan’s statement, there can be only one retort: what, exactly, has gone right in the South African economy during the ANC’s watch? Do enumerate so that we may focus on it come election time.

• Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write