Norman Manoim

Manoim was born on 24 February 1958.^[1] After high school, he was served in the South African Defence Force before enrolling at the University of the Witwatersrand,^[2] where he graduated with a BA in 1980 and an LLB in 1983.^[1] At university, he became active in student anti-apartheid politics through the student newspaper, the Wits Student, and through the influence of his brother, Irwin Manoim (later a prominent journalist).^[2] He was the president of the student representative council from 1979 to 1980,^[2] and he also served as vice-president of the National Union of South African Students.^[1]

After completing his articles of clerkship in 1984, Manoim joined Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom Attorneys, the firm of Halton Cheadle, Fink Haysom, and Clive Thompson.^[1] He rose through the ranks to become a partner at the firm, and his practice focused on human rights law, including political detentions and censorship, and labour law.^[1][3] He was also a member of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers throughout his legal career from 1984 to 1998.^[3] In 1989, his home in Yeoville, Johannesburg was firebombed while he was away on holiday; it was unclear whether the attack was intended for Manoim, for his brother (then a member of the Weekly Mail), or for one of his clients, Obed Bapela, who was staying in the house.^[4][5]

During the post-apartheid transition, Manoim's human rights work dwindled; instead, he worked with trade unions and their new investment arms.^[6] During this period, he developed his burgeoning specialism in competition law – among other things, he attended an antitrust law course by Phillip Areeda in 1993 and was a member of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies's study group on the topic in 1994.^[3] He was a member of the team which drafted the post-apartheid Competition Act, 1998, and thereafter, in 1998, was appointed as a member of the Competition Board.^[1][3]

In August 1999, Manoim joined the newly established Competition Tribunal. He served as a full-time member until August 2009, when President Jacob Zuma appointed him as the tribunal's chairperson;^[3] he succeeded David Lewis, who had held the position since the tribunal's inception.^[6] He was chairperson for a full ten-year period ending in July 2019, becoming the tribunal's longest-serving member;^[1][3] President Zuma reappointed him to a second term in August 2014.^[7][8]

Soon after he took office as chairperson, Manoim suggested that, for the sake of judicial efficacy, there should be no right to appeal Competition Tribunal matters to the Supreme Court of Appeal,^[9] and that right was indeed extinguished by the Seventeenth Amendment of the Constitution of South Africa in 2013. Another major shift during Manoim's tenure was the increased focus on imposing public interest conditions on mergers, as emphasised by Minister of Economic Development Ebrahim Patel and as imposed in high-profile Walmart–Massmart and AB InBev–Coca-Cola mergers.^[6] In contradistinction to this approach, Manoim wrote in his own decision in the Walmart–Massmart merger that the competition authorities' "job in merger control is not to make the world a better place, only to prevent it becoming worse as a result of a specific transaction".^[10] Likewise, he said in 2019 that he believed that the primary role of competition authorities in reducing monopoly power was not "breaking up markets [but] opening up markets for contestation, so, in other words, try to bring down the barriers to entry".^[6]

Manoim also presided in a dispute over the Competition Commission's long-running investigation into the so-called rand-rigging scandal, in which a large number of banks were accused of colluding to manipulate the rand; in 2019, he ruled that the commission's complaint against the banks was overly broad and ordered it to remedy the charges.^[11][12] Several of his decisions in the Competition Tribunal were published in law reports.^[1][3]

When Manoim's term ended on 31 July 2019, Mondo Mazwai was appointed to succeed him as chairperson of the Competition Tribunal.^[13] Manoim immediately began a brief stint at the University of Witwatersrand's Mandela Institute, where he was acting director until January 2020, and he additionally served as a professor of practice in the University of Johannesburg School of Economics. He was also appointed as an acting judge in November 2019; he served in the Income Tax Court and also presided in the Johannesburg High Court, where he heard a sexual harassment case against politician Shadow Shabangu.^[3][14]

In February 2021, the Judicial Service Commission announced that Manoim was among 14 candidates who had been shortlisted for possible appointment to six judicial vacancies in the Gauteng Division of the High Court of South Africa.^[15] During his interview, which was held in April, Manoim compared the Competition Tribunal to the Labour Court – both specialised courts of the first instance – and emphasised his transferable skills in adjudication.^[1] He was one of the six candidates whom the Judicial Service Commission recommended for appointment, and President Cyril Ramaphosa confirmed his appointment to the bench with effect from 1 July 2021.^[16]