SA’s credit rating has been downgraded to junk, and the rand has crashed to 19 to the dollar. The downgrading was not unexpected given the economic mismanagement over the past four decades by both the apartheid and postapartheid governments. As a comparison, the exchange rate back in 1980 was $1.50 to R1.

Businesses other than food stores and pharmacies, are now closed for the duration of the Covid-19 lockdown and emergency. So why have the JSE and SA’s foreign exchange markets not also been closed, as they were after then president PW Botha’s disastrous Rubicon speech fiasco in 1985? ..

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