The ANC has moved swiftly to indicate that its election promise on the Reserve Bank is innocuous.
But it is clear the faction aligned to former president Jacob Zuma continues to have its sights set on the central bank. The left — the SA Communist Party and the Congress of SA Trade Unions — has also been agitating for a more flexible mandate for the bank.
The ANC remains a broad church, but to effect the kind of economic turnaround it outlines in its manifesto, it cannot continue to tug in opposing directions.
The presence of the Bank promise in the manifesto marks a nod to the Zuma grouping and has probably been included to breathe life into the party’s “unity” mantra, which President Cyril Ramaphosa and other leaders ran with in overdrive in the lead-up to the weekend’s manifesto launch.
What is clear is that the ANC’s unity project spells policy uncertainty on steroids.
The manifesto says: “The ANC believes that the SA Reserve Bank must pursue a flexible monetary policy regime, aligned with the objectives of the second phase of transition. Without sacrificing price stability, monetary policy must take into account other objectives such as employment creation and economic growth.”
In September, after the Bank decided to keep the repo rate unchanged, an ANC communicator was chastised for releasing a statement in which she “implored” the monetary policy committee members to “prioritise the plight of poor South Africans”.
The statement suggested the ANC was attempting to influence the Bank’s decision — a violation of its independence that is enshrined in the constitution.
It also followed the governing party’s conference resolution to nationalise the Bank and was reminiscent of the views of public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, who recommended the mandate of the Bank be tampered with — a finding that was set aside by the courts.
The ANC quickly retracted the September statement and vowed that it was committed to the independence of the central bank.
The debate on the nationalisation of the Bank was rather strange as members arguing in favour of it appeared not to have recognised that the ownership of the bank does not impact on its mandate.
ANC KwaZulu-Natal leader Sihle Zikalala at the time told Business Day the Bank’s mandate had to be reviewed, with his province advocating for its nationalisation.
On Sunday secretary-general Ace Magashule, in an interview with eNCA, fluttered between the mandate of the bank and its nationalisation, saying the bank would be nationalised even if some members of the party’s national executive committee disagreed.
In the 10 years of the Zuma administration, when ANC resolutions were implemented only if they were beneficial to the president, his friends the Guptas and his family, it is strange that his close ally, Magashule, never spoke out against his failure to implement conference decisions.
It is now politically expedient and beneficial to his faction, as he made it clear that he believed this grouping would regain control of the party in five years’ time: “It is just a matter of five years, comrade. The [elective] conference happens every five years, so let’s work hard.”
This, of course, is only once Ramaphosa helps the ANC to regain electoral support, which has been consistently on the decline since 2009.
Who can forget how Zuma himself intervened at the Mangaung elective conference to ensure the National Development Plan was adopted as ANC policy, but forgot about it almost immediately after the resolution was taken.
In fact, the wording of the clause on the Bank in the manifesto comes directly from a Mangaung resolution, which was reaffirmed at the Nasrec conference in 2017.
The inclusion then of a seemingly harmless paragraph in its manifesto is not as innocuous as senior ANC leaders would like us to believe. As analysts have indicated, it is strange for an independent institution’s mandate to be aligned with the “second phase of the transition” — the strategic posture of a political party.
But it also clearly indicates that Ramaphosa’s hands will continue to be partially tied in effecting the necessary reforms to the country and state by those in his own top leadership who are making promises alongside him on the campaign trail.
The ANC, once again, is its own greatest opposition.
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