EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu told parliament the SA Reserve Bank (SARB) must be nationalised and its shares expropriated without compensation to correct the economic inequalities caused by apartheid.
He was addressing members of the standing committee on finance during a joint meeting in parliament on Tuesday.
Here are five quotes from his address:
Reserve Bank ownership
“The SARB presides over one of the most untransformed sectors of the economy in SA, which is the financial sector. That includes the insurance companies and banks. We know the majority of them are owned by white capitalist establishments. The ownership and control of banks and insurance companies does not reflect the demographics of SA.”
Continuation of apartheid legacy
“The Reserve Bank is responsible for the reproduction of the apartheid economic and financial inequalities.”
Nationalise SARB
“We intend to make the state the sole shareholder of the shares of the SARB. We must provide for the appointment of the board of directors, the tenure of office of the appointed directors, and give the minister the power to make regulations related to the appointment of directors.
"Whoever is an elected minister would be doing so on behalf of the democratically elected government, and therefore on behalf of the people of SA.”
Why nationalise?
“The Reserve Bank is at the apex of the financial system in SA and would be democratically owned by the people of SA. If all of us agree that a democratically elected government is a government that belongs to all the people, it must have the right to own a central bank, not a group of individual people in terms of what should happen.”
Expropriation
“There are about 802 shareholders in the Reserve Bank, and we're saying take from those 800-odd people and give it to 57-million South Africans. Our proposal is that for public purposes and in the public interest, we should take the shares of all those owners without compensation. There's no need to do so. It is not going to have any wrong impact.”
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