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The EFF’s diagnosis, set out in its founding manifesto, of the role of the financial sector remains one of the most substantive contributions to South African political economy since the 2009 financial crisis.
This is because the past 13 years have shown the diagnosis was not only correct, but our failure to act on it has continued to impoverish South Africans, particularly the youth, with increasing inequality, poverty and de-industrialisation.
Unemployment stands at 8.1-million people, while the unemployment rate among those aged 15 to 24 has climbed to more than 60%.
To this we say: the South African Reserve Bank (Sarb) is one of the central institutions, alongside the National Treasury, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and others, that have entrenched the post-apartheid economic dispensation, resisting every effort to transfer wealth to the majority of South Africans.
For many people, the Reserve Bank is simply the institution that announces changes in the interest rate. Some understand it does this to keep inflation in check and protect the value of our money so “we don’t end up like Zimbabwe or Venezuela”, and the understanding stops there.
Once you start probing this a little further, the debate quickly becomes chaotic, partly because there is a deliberate and persistent depoliticisation of the institutions that manage our economy. This is not because people aren’t interested; it’s that most of us have only been told what is necessary to avoid disturbing the status quo.
The Reserve Bank, working with National Treasury and with the endorsement of the political leadership of the day, sits at the beginning and end of decisions about who is granted a banking licence and who is not, who gets to sell insurance and who doesn’t, and how profitable the country’s largest financial institutions are allowed to be.
It shapes the conduct of these same banks and, most importantly, whether you and I pay more or less interest on everything we borrow or whether we can get a bank account at all. Consider that an estimated 7.3-million South Africans are still unbanked in this day and age.
Beyond this, the Sarb has enormous influence over capital allocation: who gets credit, how much, and for what, and over capital controls: how much money enters the country, how much leaves, and for what purpose. All of this is on top of the bank’s role as lender of last resort to other banks, and as banker and lender to national government itself.
To fully appreciate the scale of what is at stake, look at the Reserve Bank’s own numbers. At the end of March 2026, South Africa’s banks alone held R9.08-trillion in assets, the Prudential Authority’s own figures, against a national GDP of R4.77-trillion for the first quarter of the year (seasonally adjusted and annualised, per Stats SA).
For many people, the South African Reserve Bank is simply the institution that announces changes in the interest rate.
That is a stock of assets measured against a single year’s economic output, not a claim that the banks are sitting on almost double the country’s yearly production. However, the comparison makes the point that the banking sector alone is worth close to 190% of everything the country produces in a year, and it is not spread out. Five banks control 89.95% of every rand sitting in the banking system, foreign bank branches hold another 5.65%, and every other locally registered bank in the country is left fighting over the remaining 4.4%.
Insurance adds a further R5.72-trillion in assets, R5.3-trillion of it concentrated in life insurance alone, where only five large insurers hold 65% of everything. Put banking and insurance together and the regulated financial sector is sitting on close to R14.8-trillion, more than three times the value of the entire South African economy in a single year. Again, this measures a stock of assets against a year’s income rather than idle wealth, but no other sector in the country comes remotely close to this scale.
Set against this, the institutions built to serve ordinary people are a footnote, not because they are poorly conceived, but because they have been left under-rethe recent experience of VBS Bank and Ithala Bank. Mutual banks hold R4.6bn in assets, and the country’s co-operative banks and financial co-operatives together hold R747m and serve just more than 15,000 members between them in a country of tens of millions
Meanwhile the finance, real estate and business services industry contributed R1.18-trillion to GDP in the first quarter of 2026 alone (annualised), more than double the R512bn contributed by manufacturing over the same period, and the single biggest contributor to South Africa’s entire GDP.
A handful of banks, in other words, sit at the centre of the whole system, and while retail banking has changed somewhat because of new technology, the underlying fundamentals are the same: the same fundamentals that financed the development of the mines, the industrialisation linked to mining and logistics infrastructure, and the political and economic integration of Afrikaners into the broader South African economy over the course of the 20th century. Those same fundamentals persist today, only now they must also serve the economic inclusion of the black majority.
When the EFF commander in chief Julius Malema introduced the South African Reserve Bank Amendment Bill in parliament in August 2018, the mischaracterisation of, and onslaught against, the bill was not as simple as many assumed. The bill seeks, first, to transfer ownership of the Sarb to the state as part of a two-stage strategy that ultimately aims to place re-industrialisation and job creation at the top of monetary policy, and to build much greater synergy between fiscal and monetary policy, treating the two as one coherent instrument of economic transformation rather than two competing, and often contradictory, arms of the state.
This bill has been allowed to idle for years, largely because too many in our politics lack the courage to see it through. The EFF has participated in every administrative stage necessary to move the bill forward, and it now sits at a decisive moment, before the standing committee on finance, awaiting a decision on its desirability. There should be no debate about this because bringing Sarb ownership into line with the global norm, whether full public ownership or a mix of public and private ownership, means moving away from South Africa’s unusual model of a wholly privately owned central bank.
There is no real debate here because the ANC itself resolved, at its policy conference, to nationalise the Reserve Bank.
There is no real debate here because the ANC itself resolved, at its policy conference, to nationalise the Reserve Bank. It has been more than eight years since the bill was first drafted and the notice of intention to introduce it was gazetted.
It’s worth remembering that about 830 private shareholders who hold the Reserve Bank’s 2-million shares have no say over monetary policy and derive no meaningful control from their shares beyond a capped dividend and the right to elect some non-executive directors, which is precisely why the Sarb’s shares are not listed on any stock exchange, and why the value of those shares bears no relationship to the value of the Sarb and everything it holds and controls.
It is also worth being honest about where South Africa stands globally. The Sarb is one of only a handful of central banks left anywhere in the world that has private shareholders, a small group that includes Belgium, Greece, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Türkiye and the US. Most of the world moved to full state ownership of their central banks decades ago, precisely because they recognised monetary authority is a sovereign function, not a private commercial interest.
South Africa remains an outlier, not the norm, and this is a colonial-era inheritance from 1921 that has never been corrected. When defenders of the status quo tell us ownership doesn’t matter because shareholders have no say over policy, they are making our argument for us: if ownership truly makes no difference, there is no principled reason to resist transferring it to the state and the people. The only thing protected by the current arrangement is a symbolic, century-old claim by a small number of private shareholders, many of them big banks and insurers themselves, to a stake in an institution that regulates their own industry.
This is why the EFF’s second stage matters as much as the first. Ownership alone will not re-industrialise South Africa or put jobs at the centre of monetary policy. However, it removes the false mystique of independence that has been used for 13 years to insulate the Sarb from democratic accountability, while its policy choices continue to prioritise inflation targets over employment and financial stability over the transformation this economy needs.
As we reflect on 13 years of the EFF, at a moment when the movement and the country stand at a critical juncture, victory or death, we must remind the nation the Reserve Bank plays a role that should serve the people of South Africa, not the banks alone.
Maotwe is the treasurer general of the EFF.
