Explainer: SA’s Reserve Bank: ownership, mandate and independence
The president needs to ensure the continued good governance of the Bank, not least by ensuring its continued good staffing
Extract
In recent months, various debates about the South African Reserve Bank have focused broadly on three aspects – its shareholding, its mandate and its independence.
The three debates are somewhat convoluted. They are indeed three different issues, but they are interlinked.
Let’s turn to the issue of ownership first. The Reserve Bank is one of only eight central banks in the world with private shareholders. The others are in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Japan, San Marino, Switzerland and Turkey. The debate about shareholding in the Reserve Bank centres around the issue of nationalisation. Some political players, such as the third largest party — the EFF — are calling for the ownership of the Bank to be transferred from current private shareholders to the government and has tabled a bill in parliament to achieve this objective. The issue is very charged. But it’s also confused and not very well understood. There’s an assumption that a change of ownership would automatically mean a change in the role the Bank plays. This isn’t the case because, in fact, the Bank’s shareholders play no role in its mandate. In that sense, it doesn’t matter who the shareholders are, because they can’t affect its mandate; nationalisation won’t affect the independence of the Bank....
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