THE RESERVE BANK SHOULD NOT SERVE THE INTERESTS OF THE ELITE BUT THOSE OF THE COUNTRY
NEHAWU notes with concern the recent troubling comments by the South African Reserve Bank on labour strikes and the proposed credit amnesty for those who have met their debt obligations. It is not surprising to hear the Reserve Bank reiterating this scandalous falsehood that was ill-conceived by the IMF. They, like most of their western counterparts, are taking their mandate from the IMF that is not accountable to the people but to monopoly capital. The often repeated line of blaming the workers and the poor for the economic ills of this country is getting tedious.
NEHAWU still feels that the reserve bank should be nationalised and taken away from the hands of private finance monopoly. We are not surprised that they would use the workers as scapegoats for the floundering economy and encourage the continuation of their super-exploitation.
Strikes are a legitimate tool used by the workers to improve the terms and conditions of their employment. They say nothing about the income inequality that leads to the strikes and the poverty levels that keep people in debt. The SARB must also be careful not to find itself being used in a political game by the opposition parties and the anti-worker and anti-state commentators ,who cynically blame the "frequent worker's strikes" for the lack of private sector investment.
They intentionally ignore the fact that most of our economic defects are symptoms of the persisting neo-colonial labour relations compounded by the Neoliberal macroeconomic policies. The reality is that we have seen the bosses' profits and workers' wage growing in inverse proportions since 1994, which indicates that the rate of exploitation has worsened.
Even the International Monetary Fund, with its tattered credibility since the 2008 capitalist crisis, acknowledges that the South African bosses are making better average rate of profit than in other developing countries.
NEHAWU also rejects the SARB's criticism of the planned move to give credit amnesty to those who have since met their debt obligations. Again they play into the hands of the professional naysayers, who are claiming that this initiative for credit amnesty is an election ploy by the ANC. We fully support the idea of credit amnesty because we know that the blacklisting of people, including our members and their family members deprives them of not only access to credit but also employment opportunities.
The bank's proposed interventions are not in line with the policies and programmes of the South African government that proposed a radical developmental path characterised by a developmental macro-economic policy. The Reserve Bank's obsession with the so called policy of "fiscal rectitude" is the one that has left millions of people from the developing world trapped in policy.
The South African government should not bow down to barefaced blackmail by the bank but should continue to make correct and legitimate interventions including pushing for credit amnesty because it represents the poor and the marginalised.
We want to remind our government that the 53rd ANC Mangaung Conference called for a radical developmental path characterised by a developmental macro-economic policy, the National Growth Path, Industrial Policy and Action Plan, the Infrastructure Development Plan and the Human Resource Development Strategy;
The people expect the government to listen to them and also build a strong and democratic public sector that is an essential component of the democratic developmental state. This partnered with a strong strategic planning capacity will enable it to intervene in the economy and society as a whole and not rely on opaque and unaccountable institutions.
Statement issued by Sizwe Pamla, NEHAWU media liaison officer, October 31 2013
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
