Page 149 - SARB: 100-Year Journey
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The product was finalised in 1990 and published. Then a decision was taken to redesign the SARB’s corporate logo. The old emblem no longer suited the institution’s new identity.
“The team that worked on the mission statement designed a new logo for the Bank,” said Stals. “The new logo embraces the accepted mandate of the Bank, and depicts the Pretoria head office building of the SARB, standing in front of a coin, to convey the message that the Bank protects the value of the currency.”
Internally, the SARB culture was undergoing a metamorphosis. In 1955, when Stals joined as a young student, the Bank was a white, English-speaking institution. Van der Merwe, who started working at the SARB in the late 1960s, said: “When Dr [Theunis Willem ‘Bob’] de Jongh became Governor (1967– 1980), more Afrikaans-speaking people were appointed.”
In short, the SARB began as an institution dominated by white English speakers and gradually morphed into an Afrikaner-led central bank up to 1999.
The SARB’s independence
Three years after the SARB’s mission statement was published, the Minister of Finance came knocking on Governor Stals’s door and had a request. The Minister of Finance wanted information about the SARB which would be included in the new Constitution.
“I told him the Bank had a mission statement, which could be incorporated into the Constitution. We gave him a proposal based on the mission statement, which was as such accepted and incorporated into the interim Constitution,” Stals said.
Although recollections of how the SARB’s independence came to be entrenched in the final Constitution differ somewhat, there is agreement that this was a subject of robust engagement because the central bank was seen as integral to the project of rebuilding South Africa.
De Klerk’s 1990 speech is a pivotal point of entry. Essentially, it crystallised within liberation movements that democracy was an attainable goal, albeit through a negotiated settlement.
The ANC, SACP and Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) alliance entered into the negotiations for a democratic South Africa as a ‘broad church’ under the ANC banner. This mix of individuals and ideologies informed the ANC’s approach.
Joel Netshitenzhe served as government spokesman from 1998 to 2006. /Reuters via Getty Images
Ramos, Kganyago, Manuel, Momoniat, Netshitenzhe and Hogan gave insights into the ANC’s thinking at the time.
Netshitenzhe was exiled in Lusaka, Zambia, when De Klerk made the 1990 speech. “We were surprised at the extent to which De Klerk had gone,” he said.
“We didn’t expect that in that address President De Klerk would unban not only the ANC but also the SACP. That he would accept virtually all the main preconditions for negotiations contained in the Harare Declaration, which was the unbanning of organisations and the release of political prisoners,” Netshitenzhe explained.
Hogan like many others, was among the many internal activists who had been detained in the volatility of the late 1980s for her involvement in anti-apartheid protests. She spent 10 years in prison, the longest- serving woman prisoner of the anti-apartheid struggle. Interestingly, Deputy Governor Naidoo was also detained in the ‘80s.
Mokate, who had left South Africa in 1978, began to make plans to return home from the US. The same goes for Mminele, who had left his home country when he was 13 for a better life in Germany and later the United Kingdom. Both Mokate and Mminele had resigned themselves to living abroad indefinitely, and with each passing year the yearning for home never subsided but seemed a distant possibility – unimaginable even.
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