The Reserve Bank’s remaining deputy governor, Kuben Naidoo, has defended its independence and insisted that policymakers take growth and employment levels into account when setting interest rates.

He was speaking on Tuesday, a week before a monetary policy committee (MPC) meeting that might result in the first interest-rate cut since March 2018. Naidoo said that the Bank, which came under fire for tightening policy late in 2018, even as the economy struggled to emerge from recession, took a broader view than just on inflation, and this was for "sound and theoretical" reasons...