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Former political activist and political prisoner Barbara Hogan served as a Member of Parliament and a Cabinet minister in the democratic dispensation. /Gisele Wulfsohn/Gallo Images
Mokate, who would go on to serve as a Deputy Governor under Mboweni, was at the time the Chief Executive Officer of the Independent Electoral Commission.
A Government of National Unity was formed with Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected President of South Africa. Post-1994, the Constitutional Assembly had to finalise the Constitution. Moreover, Stals’s first term as Governor was coming to an end.
Despite this, the ANC did not appoint its own candidate to the powerful finance position or a new SARB Governor. “The ANC needed time to prove its reputation. Madiba kept Derek Keyes. He stayed for about a year. Chris Liebenberg was brought in.
Chris Liebenberg was only there for about a year. Then he was replaced by Trevor Manuel.” But “the SARB was like the last refuge,” according to Momoniat.
At the SARB, Stals was 60, the central bank’s age of retirement. Stals was ready to step down, but Mandela insisted the central banker stay on for another five years, an offer Stals took up.
Now for the matter of the Constitutional Assembly and the final Constitution. Hogan was part of the ANC caucus that negotiated the final Constitution in the Constitu- tional Assembly.
Hogan sat on the Portfolio Committee of Finance, which was chaired by Gill Marcus. They were charged with the task of dismantling apartheid and all its structures: the homeland structures, the provincial administrations, and setting up a whole new finance and fiscal institutional landscape. A lot of the focus was on ridding the system of all the apartheid institutions and structures, and setting up entirely new structures.
“[In] that part of the caucus which was negotiating the [final] Constitution, an equally vehement debate was about the independence of the Reserve Bank. This was ideologically driven. The Reserve Bank was still controlled by the previous incumbents. Therefore, independence was a dangerous course to go. It was also related to the question of interest rates. Who was going to determine interest rates? We needed an arsenal of instruments and policies to implement a reconstruction programme, and get rid of apartheid,” Hogan said.
“The phrases used,” said Hogan, “[were] a compromise.” “If you look at ... [section] 224(1) [of the Constitution] it says: ‘The primary objective of the Reserve Bank is to protect the value of the currency.’ As Reserve Banks do.” She continues: “Then we added ‘in the interest of balanced and sustainable economic growth in the Republic’.”
Hogan also points out that: “Chris Stals was not a hard- line monetarist, as you found within America, for instance, during the reign of the hard-line monetarists. Chris Stals was far more eclectic. He was not a monetary supply person, above all else. He was much more pragmatic and eclectic. That he is given credit for.”