Lesetja Kganyago: Overview of the South African economy

Address by Mr Lesetja Kganyago, Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, at the 104th annual ordinary general meeting of the SARB shareholders, Pretoria, 30 July 2024. 

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Introduction

After another momentous year, today we convene the South African Reserve Bank's (SARB) annual Ordinary General Meeting (AGM). In April, we marked 30 years of South Africa's still-young democracy. It has been an extraordinary three decades, with a global financial crisis rivalling that of 1929, a catastrophic health pandemic, as well as our own ongoing struggle to develop a new democratic dispensation to better address our legacy of inequality and poverty.

Despite these many challenges, the recent national and provincial elections have underscored our resilience as a society, and a new government of national unity has been ushered in.

While the SARB has been in existence for over a century, it is our democratic Constitution that sets its current mandate: to protect the value of the local currency in the interest of balanced and sustainable economic growth – and to do so without fear, favour or prejudice.