I just read an article by Trevor Ncube’s rag, suggesting that Zimbabwe should adopt the South African Rand as its currency.

It boggles my mind how any journalist worth their salt could entertain the thought of an independent African country adopting a currency controlled by a neo-colonial, privately owned white (Western) monopoly reserve bank like the SARB (South African Reserve Bank) that is being used by the West and the apartheid order to exploit South Africa, undermine its government and to advance neo-colonialism in Africa.

Is it a lack of literacy, or agency on behalf of the imperialists that would lead a professional journalist to even advance such a blatant apartheid era agenda?

Why does the journalist think there has been endless talk about nationalizing the South African Reserve Bank when South Africans talk about radical economic transformation? It’s because this reserve bank of South Africa:

1. regulates, through racial discrimination, who becomes a commercial bank or not in South Africa, and as a result, this apartheid instrument has been preventing the licensing of a black-owned commercial bank in South Africa.

2. The same institution (SARB) also controls the printing and supply of the rand, whose undersupply is shrinking the South African economy. Its monetary policy facilitates the externalization of value from South Africa to the west while, through manipulation of interest rates, suppression of money supply, and the advancement of anti-competitive colonial apartheid monetary policy, it denies financing to local SOEs and black businesses. Consequently, South Africa—a developing third-world economy—has been growing slower than mature economies for the past ten years.

3. The biggest shareholders of the same reserve bank [the white commercial banks of South Africa and foreign entities] have been sabotaging the Rand with the complicity of the SARB, and this has resulted in the devaluation of the Rand, deindustrialization of South Africa, sabotage of the ANC government, thus curating underfunded SOEs, load-shedding and the worst poverty and inequality in the world.

4. This same reserve bank was responsible for facilitating the illegal externalization and laundering of billions of dollars by white farmers and white businesses (many of which were apartheid South African companies) from Zimbabwe to the South African financial system, to crash the Zim dollar in the early 2000s, to effect illegal Western sanctions on Zimbabwe.

It is doing the same in Congo and other African countries that are being raped and pillaged by South African and western corporations.

5. Today, the bank is also overcomplying with and implementing illegal sanctions upon innocent Zimbabweans by denying them banking services and prohibiting U.S. dollar notes from being sent from South African banks to Zimbabwean banks.

In many ways, as during apartheid, the SARB is an instrument for facilitating U.S. and Western financial warfare in Africa.

How then would any logically thinking Zimbabwean advocate for an apartheid bank with sanctions upon our nation to control your money supply and monetary policy?

Zimbabweans should read the book #InsideTheReserveBank by Stephen Goodson, the Reserve Bank Act, and the Banking Act of South Africa, alongside our #ZASMvsSAbanksandUSA papers in the Gauteng High Court, to understand how the South African Reserve Bank is an instrument of imperialism that is destroying Africa, before advocating for us to render our financial system a vassal of a bank that discriminates against its own citizens, facilitates money laundering and breaks international law in pursuit of imperialist objectives.

By Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare

Chairman of the Zimbabwe Anti-Sanctions Movement (ZASM) and CEO of Frontline Strat Marketing Consultancy. He writes in his personal capacity.