The barbarians are at the gate of the Reserve Bank. It is among the last institutions to yield to the will of the kleptocratic elite.The public protector, a title that now drips with irony, is being used as the battering ram. Her report on the bail-out of Bankorp in the early 1990s mysteriously morphed into an attack on the Bank’s inflation targeting regime. It is the same playbook used to attack the South African Revenue Service and Pravin Gordhan’s finance ministry: use state institutions to investigate and cast aspersions; find or create reports that allege wrongdoing; add in a healthy dose of propaganda to undermine the target’s public reputation. And then strike to remove the head and install a supplicant.The public protector’s report is now facing judicial review after applications by the Reserve Bank, Absa and Parliament.The fact that the Treasury has not yet applied for review shows that the strategy there has succeeded. In its odd silence, we can see the malevolent hand of ...
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