(Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg via Getty Images) 
South Africa’s central bank is an anomaly: part-private, with somewhere between 800 to 1,000 shareholders. In reality, those shareholders have no real say over monetary policy, but are largely a legacy from the early days of central banking – a relic that’s survived global reform and local battles alike.
That quirk has come before Parliament with public comment regarding the proposed, EFF sponsored, South African Reserve Bank Amendment Bill, which aims to nationalise the SA Reserve Bank (Sarb) – buying out its private shareholders and shifting the shares fully to the state – has resurfaced alongside the Financial Sector Laws Amendment Act, which arguably does far more to rewrite the country’s bank failure rulebook.
“What is the problem with government being the sole shareholder on behalf of the 61 million people of South Africa?” asked EFF MP Omphile Maotwe during a Standing Committee on Finance hearing on 2 July 2025.
“If you say there will not be any change, so what is the problem when we want this thing to be in the state?”
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Old Mutual Wealth’s chief investment strategist Izak Odendaal is blunt in his comment to Daily Maverick: “The real shield for credibility isn’t a share register but the constitutional guardrails that keep the Sarb’s policy boring – on purpose”.
That view clashes with economists and market watchers who say the real safeguard isn’t who holds the shares, but whether the backstop works when it matters.
What does history tell us?
Dawie Roodt is an economist and a Reserve Bank shareholder, a fact that for transparency he declared to Daily Maverick.
“I use it for my work… but to be really honest, I have not been [to] an AGM for many, many years as well.” The dividend, he adds, is fixed and around R8 annually.
“Almost all central banks started off as privately owned banks,” he explains.
That legacy has shifted in most countries, but not fully here. Private shareholders still appoint half the Sarb’s directors, a governance guardrail Dawie believes still matters.
“I think that’s a very good idea… you get this extra set of eyes. See what happened to Eskom or the Post Office – there was no private sector oversight.”
New powers, old questions
The deeper reform sits in the Amendment Act. It hands the Reserve Bank resolution authority status: power to step in if a bank fails, override insolvency, push through rescue or wind-down.
It also launches the Corporation for Deposit Insurance (Codi), South Africa’s first explicit deposit insurance fund – R20-billion funded by the banks themselves, not taxpayers. But that parachute remains untested.
Odendaal argues that while Codi aligns South Africa with global norms, the real stress test is when confidence wobbles. “A banking system runs on trust,” he told Daily Maverick.
“If that breaks, no insurance fund is big enough – so the signal from Parliament really does matter.”
Defending the founding papers
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) argued a nationalisation-related point to Parliament that the Bill risks overstepping constitutional lines.
“[This Bill] effectively provides for expropriation without compensation, which is not constitutional… Compensation has to be borne by agreement… No compensation can never be agreeable, and it must be just and equitable,” IRR representative Gabriel Crouse told MPs during the hearing.
Treasury also raised somewhat adjacent nationalisation concerns.
Chris Axelsson, Director-General for Tax and Financial Sector Policy, said during the hearing: “The main point in terms of the amendment Bill that we are concerned about is the rights of the current shareholders… There’s no recognition of what will happen if from one day they hold the shares and the next day the state owns those shares. It would be a forced takeover – like an expropriation of those shares.”
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He warned of “bilateral investment treaties” that could drag South Africa into international legal fights.
“Changing the composition of ownership doesn’t result in any material change in the current role of government… The current structure doesn’t have any impact on the mandate and the independence of the Sarb.”
For now, the cost of buying out shareholders remains unknown, but any forced expropriation could invite protracted litigation and ripple through foreign investor sentiment, a risk flagged repeatedly in hearings.
Credibility is the currency
For Roodt, that’s the point. “The only thing that changes is the signal – and that’s not a good signal because what we have currently works very, very well,” he said. “You don’t even have to change policy. You just have to change the ownership… the market is going to lose confidence.”
The myth that shareholders can steer monetary policy doesn’t survive contact with how the Sarb works. “As a shareholder, I have absolutely no say [in monetary policy]… the governor and deputy governors are presidential appointments,” Roodt said. “The argument that shareholders influence policy is completely incorrect.”
Despite the heat of the debate, no concrete timeline for the nationalisation amendment has been confirmed. Odendaal warns that drawn-out political noise alone can bleed credibility fast, even before a vote is called.
Meanwhile, markets and savers watch whether the Sarb’s resolution powers and its new insurance backstop can survive the first real test unscathed.
The currency of credibility
Odendaal’s line on the real backstop remains verified: “Deposit insurance is the parachute – don’t panic, your money’s safe,” he said.
Odendaal says the Reserve Bank’s real currency is credibility. “You want your central bank to be dull and dependable,” he says. “Once it becomes political theatre, you risk paying that cost in the currency.”
Roodt’s bigger worry is whether the Sarb stays ahead of the next wave: stablecoins, central bank digital currencies and the new money landscape.
“Money plays a crucial role in a modern economy… there are new kinds of money… the landscape could change completely,” he said. “If the Reserve Bank doesn’t stay on top of new technology… they risk becoming irrelevant.”
“Leave it as it is. If it’s not broken, why fix it?” Roodt said.
The test for South Africa’s central bank won’t be its share certificates, but whether the resolution powers, deposit backstops and credibility hold when the next wobble hits. DM