The South African government should nationalise the South African Reserve Bank, this is according to financial journalist and analyst Duma Gqubule.
He was speaking during an interview with the SABC and said what worried him was that there was a lot of fake news as to how much it would cost for the government to nationalise the Reserve Bank.
"The Reserve Bank has two million shares, and there are 800 shareholders. You can't own more than 10,000 shares. The last time I looked, the shares were trading at about R2 per share. So if you multiply that, the Reserve Bank is worth R20 million," Gqubule said.
He said the shareholders are not making much money from being shareholders of the Reserve Bank. He said most of them get a dividend of about 1%.
"If you have R100 000 worth of shares, your dividend annually would be R1000. I would ask them if it's patriotism or what. If the government makes an offer, it will cost R30 to R40 million rands with the premium, and then if the shareholders don't accept, then they go back to the branches and say, We tried our best," he said.
Gqubule said the government should stop paying lip service to the masses about nationalising the Reserve bank and not follow through.
"There is the independence of the Reserve Bank and the composition of the Monetary Policy Committee. The ANC, in its last conference, it said the reserve bank must be nationalised because there is an anomaly. There are only seven other central banks throughout the world that have got private shareholders, and there are only three central banks in the world that are outside Africa, with no government shareholding. Those are Greece, Italy, and the US. So it is an anomaly," he said.
Gqubule said there is no other option but to nationalise the Reserve Bank.
"The ANC members in 2012 also said we need a flexible monetary policy that takes into account inflation, employment growth, and in 2017. And they said the same thing. And then the sixth policy conference said the same thing we need a flexible reserve bank that must be added to exchange rates, which I think is correct because we are a mining country, and we need to have a view on the exchange rate. So you've had all these resolutions, and the ANC deploys, and the government finds ways to circumvent internal democracy, and they never provide an explanation as to why they can't implement resolution after resolution around the ownership of the Reserve Bank and the mandate of the Reserve Bank.
He called on the ANC members to debate why it is not implementing its resolutions on the Reserve Bank.
"You can't have a situation where the ANC resolutions are just suggestions," he said.
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