SA needs bold action to transform – Mboweni

Tito Mboweni. File picture: Simphiwe Mbokazi

Tito Mboweni. File picture: Simphiwe Mbokazi

Published May 23, 2014

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South Africa needed “bold, decisive, courageous and responsible action” to transform its economy, Tito Mboweni, the former chairman of AngloGold Ashanti who declined a nomination for a seat in Parliament, said on his Facebook page yesterday.

“We need deep-seated economic transformation,” he said, adding: “We cannot proceed like we have been doing.”

After winning the May 7 election, ANC President Jacob Zuma is set to name his cabinet a day after he is sworn into office for a second term tomorrow. Mboweni was named by some political analysts and economists as a possible candidate for finance minister if Zuma did not retain Pravin Gordhan in the position.

South Africa’s economy has suffered from dwindling investor confidence amid credit-rating downgrades, a weakening currency and a series of strikes.

Zuma and cabinet ministers have said black ownership in the economy needed to be increased. Two decades after the end of apartheid, black citizens on average earn a sixth of what their white counterparts do and 1.9 million households have no income, according to census data.

Mboweni, who was nominated as an ANC legislator, had withdrawn his name from the list to “push economic transformation” through his Mboweni Brothers Investment Holdings, the former Reserve Bank governor added.

“We need capital in order to drive economic transformation,” Mboweni said. “Without capital, we are behaving like we are in a French breakfast picnic.”

Mboweni was reappointed to the ANC’s national executive committee, the ruling party’s top decision-making body, in 2012. He had resigned from AngloGold on February 17 to focus on his “increasing portfolio of professional commitments”, the mining company said at the time.

Mboweni said that he would continue his work as a professor of economics at a number of universities, adding that he might become a chancellor or chairman of council at a university. He also said he planned to be active in “state structures”. – Bloomberg

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