Afrodissident says yes:

Everybody was watching to see whether he would keep or replace Mbeki’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel, associated with the conservative economic policies adopted by the government since 1996 (policies that were good for the market, but bad for the country’s poor majority). In the end, Zuma appointed a new finance minister, Pravin Gordhan (full disclosure: I like Gordhan, who served on the board of my last employer in South Africa), who reformed the country’s tax service. But Zuma also did something else: he promoted Manuel to a new post: as minister in the presidency of a powerful new department, the national planning commission, which will coordinate government policy.

The long and the short of it: Trevor Manuel is still the most powerful man in South Africa’s government.

But as Stanley Uys and Paul Trewhela point out, the very existence of of a “national planning commission” is antithetical to the idea of a free market, which operates according to dispersed information signals rather than a single “National Plan”. Furthermore, government officials like Manuel may come and go, but new bureaucracies last forever:

Manuel has now been moved, to function instead as minister in the presidency in charge of a new National Planning Division, which “will be responsible for strategic planning for the country to ensure one National Plan to which all spheres of government would adhere.”

Few know what this commission means.

Just days before the announcement of its formation, Matthews Phosa (one of the ANC’s top six leaders) said privately that the commission would never be created. The opposition Democratic Alliance sees it as “a step into the unknown.” In addition to the possibility of turf wars in the government, there is uncertainty anyway over Manuel’s shelf-life. There is speculation that it will not be long before he leaves government to take up one or other attractive international position. This is a matter of concern for the corporate world, but also worrying for it will be how the National Planning Division then continues to function, and the political mindset of the person who replaces Manuel: should this person prove, say, to be a Communist Party hardliner.

At this point, nobody knows precisely what the National Planning Commission will do. However, it seems clear that it will have two features - a highly elastic mandate and considerable power to shape policy - that will potentially make it a worrying instrument of economic centralisation under Manuel’s successor. If the creation of this new department was the price we had to pay for Trevor Manuel remaining in government, perhaps we would have been better off without him.