One of SA’s most prominent investment bankers, Colin Coleman, has retired as sub-Saharan African CEO of the storied investment banking group Goldman Sachs, taking up an academic post while promising to stay involved in helping out SA’s struggling economy.

Coleman, 57, has spent the past 20 years with Goldman Sachs and will leave the firm at the end of the year to become a senior fellow and lecturer with Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He will also remain co-chair of the Youth Employment Service (YES) initiative.

Coleman was rumoured to be in line for a post in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet, but in the end, it’s probable that someone from a US investment bank, no matter how dedicated to SA, was too tricky to square with the ANC’s support base.

Coleman said on Tuesday that he would “love to serve the people of SA in a meaningful way. I would be dishonest if I told you otherwise”. The lecturing job at Yale would be transitional so “there may be time for that in the future, or there may not. I have to act on the basis of what I can control, not what I can’t.”

Coleman is well known for his bullish view of SA’s prospects and is sometimes criticised for a slightly rose-tinted view, but he makes no apology for remaining steadfastly positive.

“No patriotic South African would be complacent about half a percentage-point growth, and 38% broad unemployment.” The capacity of the SA economy to grow has fallen by half from 4% to 2%, he estimates.

But SA has a population growth rate of 2.5% and a current economic growth rate of half that, so “it can’t really get worse”. Ramaphosa might be criticised for lethargy, but “there is absolutely no doubt that the direction of change is positive”.

Coleman’s involvement in Youth Employment Service (YES), a private-public partnership that aims to place one million young South Africans as interns in South African businesses over the next five years, is the kind of role he sees for himself in future.

The problem is that politicians broadly often don’t have implementation expertise, and need private-sector skills to make that implementation happen, he says. The private sector, on the other hand, often misunderstands politics.

The YES initiative is just one of the interactions between business and government that Coleman and a collection of other CEOs of SA companies, including Discovery’s Adrian Gore and former Investec CEO Stephen Koseff, have initiated to help bridge this gap.

Whether it will work remains to be seen. The YES initiative, for example, has now placed about 30,000 young South Africans in work experience and apprenticeships, well short where it should be if the initiative is to reach its target of one million job placements in five years.

On the business side, Coleman’s participation in dealmaking in SA’s business has been just extraordinary, and in all but a few isolated cases, very successful. From SABMiller’s sale to AB Inbev to the splitting of AngloGold from Anglo American, to Barclay’s investment in Absa and also ironically its subsequent sale of Absa, Coleman and Goldman Sachs were there.

The deal of which he is most proud is the purchase by Chinese ICBC of a stake in Standard Bank. “I was really involved in putting that together”. At the time it was the largest investment by a Chinese company outside of that country.

There were some disasters too, like Steinhoff’s ill-fated listing on the Frankfurt stock exchange, the DAX. But overall, Coleman says he is looking forward to new challenges. BM