Last week this newspaper reported an event which brought back just what the old South Africa was like. We pictured a 1991 meeting involving the governor of the Reserve Bank, a Cabinet minister and a former chief justice at which the bank’s extraordinary secret decision to hand out money to an ailing bank was discussed — and a move which could be construed, at the very least, as improper was implicitly accepted by some of the most powerful men in the country.
We are reminded of how secretive society was and how corruptive this practice was. And it brings home again how members of an Afrikaner brotherhood could sit in smoke-filled rooms and divide the spoils of apartheid between them.
Which brings us to the present. Now the same governor, under a different government and operating with a changed set of rules, finds that these distasteful events of the past are coming back to haunt him. And by implication, they haunt our country and its shaky currency.
Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals’s response has been to opt for silence. He has said nothing about our story and its serious implications. He has neither denied its accuracy, nor defended his past actions.
But the story — which has plagued the Bank for some years now — is not going to go away. A proper response would be for a full judicial inquiry to investigate this tale, and for Stals to be encouraged to bring it out into the open in order to put the matter behind him.
There are many ways in which the issue could be dealt with. Perhaps the worst is the one Stals has chosen — keeping silent and praying that the problem goes away.