Who We Are

Ebrahim Patel was appointed Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition on 29 May 2019 by President Cyril Ramaphosa, combining the portfolios of Economic Development with Trade & Industry. Prior to this, he was South Africa’s Minister of Economic Development, since May 2009.

During the ten years as Economic Development Minister, he reshaped competition policy through negotiating far-reaching public interest commitments from companies in large mergers; supporting strong action by the regulators against cartels and collusion; and drafting new legislation to address economic concentration and abuse of dominance in the economy (adopted by Parliament during 2018).

He worked with a number of other ministries to lead the state’s approach to infrastructure development (through the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission, the PICC, whose technical Secretariat he headed).

His responsibilities since 2010 included overall strategic direction to the Industrial Development Corporation (the IDC), under whose leadership it expanded its approvals for new investment to R110 billion over the period, helping to create or save hundreds of thousands of jobs in South Africa, expand operations in the rest of Africa, support the development of renewable energy and focus on new industrial development (in areas such as food, car-making, steel production, clothing & textiles and the 4th Industrial Revolution). He directed the merger of separate small business funding institutions into the Small Enterprise Finance Agency (SEFA).

Through his oversight over the work of ITAC, he introduced a policy directive to enable greater use of scrap metal in local foundries and steel mini-mills, which helped to attract new investment and support local industrial capacity. He chaired the preparatory committee for the inaugural Presidential Investment Conference convened in October 2018.

His Ministry coordinated the work on the ‘New Growth Path’ economic strategy for South Africa, adopted by Cabinet in October 2010, which identified the centrality of employment as a development strategy, and set out a number of ‘jobs drivers’ in the economy. Since the adoption of the New Growth Path to December 2018, about 2,9 million net new jobs were created in South Africa.

He coordinated the conclusion of a number of social accords between government and other social partners on training, the green economy, youth employment and local procurement, in the period 2011-2013.

He was born in 1962. His mother worked for many years in clothing factories in Cape Town. He had a long history of involvement in anti-apartheid activism, playing an active role in student, youth, community and worker protests. He was detained on three occasions during the apartheid era without trial and was held under the Internal Security Act and the Terrorism Act.

During the democratic period, he contributed to social dialogue, labour and employment matters, having led organised labour’s negotiations on economic policy in South Africa. In this context, he was closely involved in drafting a number of broad accords on economic policy matters. He has been involved in the textile industry in the organisation of labour and in dealing with social, trade and industrial matters. He has served for more than a decade on the Governing Body of the UN agency, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and led global negotiations on matters as diverse as policy and standard-setting on human resources development, cooperatives, the employment relationship, globalisation and social justice and the Global Employment Agenda.

He served as a nominee of President Nelson Mandela on South Africa’s first Financial and Fiscal Commission. He also served on the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac), the Council of Higher Education (CHE) and the Council of the University of Cape Town for a number of years. He studied at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town.