Gavin Woods (politician)
Gavin Woods (born 1948 in Durban, South Africa) grew up and was educated in the small KwaZulu town of Estcourt at the foot of the Drakensberg. He was the second of an eight children family. He contracted polio in his year of birth and has lived a life seriously affected by resultant physical afflictions. He first learnt to walk with the help of leg-irons when he was six years old and has undergone more that fifty surgical procedures over his life. This has meant numerous periods of hospitalisation over the years two of these being in excess of twelve months. This in turn caused a difficult primary and secondary education career with many months of abstention from school.
Early working career included Barclays Bank, AECI Chemicals, Toyota and Premier Foods where he held various accounting and financial management positions. He then diversified his study direction to include Sociology and Development Economics together with a career redirection into market and social research. In addition to his undergraduate studies he has earned a master's degree in Economics, an MBA, a Doctorate in Economics and a master's degree in Public Finance.
In 1984 he was appointed executive director of a policy research institution which in the main did research for the then KwaZulu government and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). Over the next ten years he researched and authored numerous socioeconomic and political publications. He also participated in many domestic and international conferences in the years leading up to 1994 where much analysis and policy work was deliberated on in anticipation of the post-apartheid South Africa.
In 1994 he was included in the IFP delegation of MPs which were part of the first post-apartheid parliament. In his fifteen years as an MP he was the Economics spokesperson for the IFP and served on the Finance and Public Accounts committees. The highlights of his parliamentary career included chairing the committee which produced the Public Finance Management Act of 1999 (PFMA) and having chaired the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) during the second democratic parliament. His enthusiasm for stamping out corruption and improving the value-for-money activities of government however saw increasing tensions between him and senior members of the ruling party.
This came to a head due to the leading role he played together with Andrew Feinstein (an ANC MP) in launching an investigation into the multi-billion "arms deal". After Feinstein was forced out of Parliament by the ANC he soldiered on for another year in order to try and keep pressure on the formal investigation to resist pressure that was put on it by the Executive to whitewash the arms deal processes. The investigation however became severely politically compromised and as such avoided making any controversial findings - notwithstanding the substantial circumstantial evidence which existed to the contrary. His tough-on-corruption and tough-on-incompetence style of Chairmanship caused considerable embarrassment to the ruling party which in turn led to his becoming so undermined that the Committee itself became dysfunctional. He resigned his position as Chairperson in protest of the politicisation of the Committee and the weakening of its critical oversight role.
In 2007 he had a fall out with the leader of the IFP over derogatory comments made by the leader concerning his physical disabilities. He took the opportunity to "cross the floor" to another black political party (NADECO) which shared similar policies to that of the IFP.
While still an MP he accepted an invitation by Stellenbosch University in 2007 to be an Associate Professor teaching Public Finance to postgraduate classes. In 2009 he decided to leave politics and to take up a full professorship at Stellenbosch University where in addition to his teaching and supervisory responsibilities he was mandated to establish a research unit focusing on public corruption in South Africa.
In 2014 he retired from academia having reached the compulsory retirement age. He retained his position on International Academic Journal's editorial boards and as a Senior Research Fellow of a major Dutch university. for the next three years. He also continued to accept international assignments from the World Bank, USAID, UNDP and GOPAC. These involved work in foreign governments and foreign parliaments in helping to improve financial management practices, anti-corruptions systems and oversight practices. He undertook fifteen such assignments over a twenty-year period. He also accepted three invitations to deliver lectures to World Bank officials.
He then in 2014 accepted nomination by the Premier of the Western Cape to be the Provincial Commissioner of the Public Service Commission. Due to a significant deterioration of his physical situation and the increasing difficult with his mobility he left the Commission in 2018.
He is married to Merja Matikainen and has four children from his first marriage.