Trevor Manuel is used to adulation. After a decade in charge of South Africa’s purse strings, he is regularly introduced as the country’s best ever finance minister. His budget speech in February was hailed at home as the ultimate of its genre, confident, visionary and yet canny. Since Paul Wolfowitz’s demise as head of the World Bank he was even punted as a possible successor – an idea which after a few days of speculative headlines he politely rejected as absurd. In meetings he frequently exudes the restlessness – and even intemperance – of a man who is ready for a new challenge.

Yet when asked whether he has not been a little unambitious and whether South Africa’s 5 per cent economic growth rate should be higher, given the country’s huge unemployment rate, he eschews the style of quickfire putdown for which he has become famous. He picks his words with great care, embarking on a brief history lesson of the vagaries of South Africa’s economy since the late decades of apartheid before concluding: “Our analysis would indicate that without doing a heck of a lot else that [growth of between 4.5 and 5 per cent] is sustainable. But we would be the first to say that the growth is insufficient to deal with all the challenges in front of us.”