Thank you, Mr Chairman. In a salient showing of the limits of democracy, this Bill does just the opposite of what it proposed to achieve, a fact clearly highlighted in all the public input, but ignored by the media and commentators.
The Bill increases the composition of the Board with people without the required specialised, relevant experience, but takes all the powers of management away from such a bloated board and places them exclusively in the hands of the Governor and the bank's inner and secretive circle. The Bill does nothing to deal with private profits on the bank's shares - the very reason given for its introduction by the Minister. It does nothing to create transparency, representation and accountability where it matters - in the Monetary Policy Committee, which creates and destroys money at will, without any public official or public representative involved in, or aware of, this process.
Effectively, this Bill is an internal coup d'tat to concentrate even more power away from public accountability and transparency. It excludes and silences the individual shareholders who, warts and all, are the only existing public watchdog within the bank.
The Bill leaves fundamental issues unaddressed. Who does the Reserve Bank really serve: the country or the banking community? Its constitutionally required independence is threatened more by the incestuous embrace of the banking community than by the ineffective and tenuous liaison with our government.
The secretive black box within which the operations of the Reserve Bank take place has remained unaffected. The bank can do as it wishes in creating and destroying fiat money as long as it does so within the broad inflation targets set by government. And, in so doing, it partakes in the broader process through which central banks generate recessions or economic booms at the time they deem best.
Neither the Minister nor this Parliament has the statutory power or the in- house skills base to check on what goes on within the black box, or to answer the allegations we heard during public comments, such as that the gold reserves of South Africa have been moved to England; that the huge losses posted by the Reserve Bank this year are really losses of the banking system transferred to the Reserve Bank by shifting reserve requirements and titular ownership; and that there are preferential tracks for application under the Exchange Control Acts which are said to be applied differently, depending on who the client is. Even the Minister has no power to shine a light into the black box.
The Reserve Bank has been promising to be accountable and transparent, exactly because this Bill does not create any legal obligation for it to do so, and we must rely merely on its promises. The public input we received about this Bill ... [Time expired.] Under these conditions we cannot but oppose this Bill.