The ANC must stop squabbling and go to the IMF

7 April 2020

The ANC’s internal squabbling over whether or not South Africa should approach the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is jeopardising the Covid-19 relief efforts.

The fact is that the government has very little money, and urgently needs as much money as is available to fund the Covid-19 relief effort and to support the economy. We should be getting funding wherever we can, especially if it is at the very low interest rates that global financial institutions are now offering.

To stop the government from approaching the IMF would be to put petty ideological objections above the urgent needs of the relief effort. Finance Minister, Tito Mboweni, and President Cyril Ramaphosa should end this damaging squabbling and make it clear that South Africa needs urgent financial help, and that there should be no objection to approaching the IMF.

We need more money urgently for health care workers, for protective gear, for equipment, and for support for small businesses and employees who have lost their job.

In a letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa, in addition to rejecting a Word Bank/IMF bailout, the ANC's Ace Magashule, COSATU'S Bheki Ntshalintshali, and SACP’s Solly Mapaila proposed a ruinous interference in the South Africa Reserve Bank (SARB), a raid on pension funds and a state led economic development model.

If there is one takeaway from the current economic crisis, it is that the Magashule-led radicals in the ANC have learnt nothing, and are intent on continuing a policy direction that has collapsed the economy and left the state all but impotent to respond in this time of crisis.

The anti-growth recommendations contained in the letter are a repudiation of Cyril Rampahosa’s statement to Mboweni that “We now need to move more boldly on the structural reforms programme.”

South Africa needs genuine economic reforms that are cognisant of our tenuous national debt position, unsustainable expenditure levels, and rising unemployment. Anything less will be an exercise in futility.

Issuedby Geordin Hill-Lewis,DA Shadow Minister of Finance, 7 April 2020