EDITORIAL: Critics banking on false vision
Anyone expecting that the Bank would behave differently … is plain wrong
Opening the Reserve Bank’s 97th annual general meeting last week, governor Lesetja Kganyago noted rather wryly that the Bank had been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.One of those is private shareholding in the Bank, which has come up as an issue yet again, as it tends to do every few years. This time, the ANC and two leading trade union federations joined the fray, as did Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba’s adviser Chris Malikane, all shouting loudly for the Bank to be nationalised in a move that prompted a sharp decline in the rand exchange rate.The usually sensible head of the ANC’s economic transformation committee, Enoch Godongwana, led the charge, pointing to the "anomaly" of the Bank stock being held by private investors and proposing the Bank get rid of these – though not necessarily immediately.True, the shareholding structure is an anomalous legacy going back 97 years to the founding of the Bank at a time when many central banks were private entities. As Kganyago po...
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