Johannesburg - President Jacob Zuma said the dominance of the country’s four major banks must end to enable more entrants into the industry and improve access to the economy for the black majority.
“There’s a skewed kind of economic control,” Zuma said on Sunday. “We actually frustrate our economy deliberately by letting a few people control the economy. So we want to change that. Let us have more banks and share that space. ”
The country’s five largest lenders, including the so-called Big Four of Standard Bank Group, Barclays Africa Group, FirstRand and Nedbank control about 90 percent of banking assets in the country.
Criticism of the lenders from Zuma and his supporters intensified after the institutions refused to do business with companies linked to the Gupta family, who are friends with the president and in business with his son.
Zuma was speaking at an event hosted by The New Age newspaper, which has ties to the Guptas.
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The family, led by brothers Atul, Ajay and Rajesh, came to South Africa from India in 1993 and built a business group ranging from computers to uranium mining.
His comments follow the State of the Nation address on Thursday, in which he said the inclusion of the black majority in the economy has been too slow.
The monopoly in the mining sector should also be addressed, Zuma said, while increasing land ownership for black people discriminated against during apartheid also formed part of the government’s plan to transform the economy.
“Let us not have others having the monopoly and others having nothing,” he said. “If we don’t do it as a country, we are sitting with a time bomb.”