People in Economics: Undercover Operator

• Position: a Senior Editor on the staff of Finance & Development.

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.

Direct approach

The first entity to experience Ramos’s signature direct approach to problem solving was the commercial bank where she took her first job in 1978. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, to a family that emigrated to South Africa when she was aged 6, Ramos went through school in a town 60 miles from Johannesburg. “When I started at the bank I realized that they had a great scholarship, and when I applied for it I was told it wasn’t open to women,” Ramos recalls. “I started a big battle with the bank about how unfair this was. Eventually there was a change of management at the bank that also changed the rules of the game. By then I had fought this for about five years, all the way up to the head office, and they decided I had caused enough chaos. They changed the rules, and I was the first woman they sent to university on that scholarship.”

Exposure to the political radicalism at the University of the Witwatersrand (known as “Wits” for short) changed Ramos. It was the mid-1980s, when international sanctions were beginning to bite South Africa and to encourage greater domestic activism against minority rule. “I went to Wits in what were some highly political years, and I got a bit involved and I certainly got very sensitized politically. And it was quite hard to come back to work at the bank after university.” She returned to academic life as an economics lecturer, and connected with the ANC, the political movement that is now South Africa’s ruling party but was still outlawed—“banned” under domestic laws—in the 1980s. While teaching in posts at Wits, the University of South Africa, and the London School of Economics (LSE), Ramos covertly joined the ANC’s economics section.

“I was quite involved in shaping a lot of the debate as part of the economics policy team in the ANC. I spent a lot of time flying between Johannesburg and other places to do political work before the ANC was unbanned. A lot of the economic policy documentation in the ANC we wrote outside the country.” Even now, Ramos does not specify where. In 1990 the ANC was unbanned, de facto leader Nelson Mandela was...