THERE is a profoundly important bill before Parliament.
Introduced by the EFF, it lapsed, revived and is now silently dying. It is the South African Reserve Bank Amendment Bill.
It is a bill with the potential to change democracy, disrupt policy and regulatory capture, as well as arrest South Africa’s economic decline.
The bill seeks to change the current private ownership of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to democratic ownership under government custodianship (nationalisation).
There is widespread opposition to nationalisation among the local elite, their foreign allies, beneficiaries of pro-rich monetary policies and their representative institutions. Their objections are understandable, given their interests.
Paradoxically, even the Treasury and the SARB, supposedly serving national interests, object. For these two, it is extraordinarily odd, but absolutely consistent with their well-known ideological…
