South Africa’s ruling African National Congress gushed a double whammy of capital-flight-creating rulings this afternoon. The Rand is tumbling on Bloomberg headlines that the ANC is said to seek constitutional changes for land expropriation (from whites) without compensation, but perhaps even more worrisome, the ruling party has decided that the Reserve Bank must be wholly owned by the state:
Volatility in the Rand is surging in the run up to a conference when the ruling ANC could replace Jacob Zuma as its leader.
According to Bloomberg, the South African rand’s price swings are set to increase over the next two months as the ruling African National Congress prepares to replace President Jacob Zuma as party leader during a Dec. 16-20 conference.
With every passing day the formerly booming nation of South Africa is getting ever closer to the formerly banana republic of Zimbabwe.
On Wednesday, South Africa's ruling African National Congress proposed at its 5th annual national policy conference that in addition to potentially nationalizing the country's central bank, that land expropriation without compensation should be allowed where it is "necessary and unavoidable," President Jacob Zuma said.
Authored by Ilana Mercer via The Mises Institute,
Yes, it has happened. A mere 23 years after the 1994 transition, in South Africa, to raw ripe democracy, six years following the publication of a wide-ranging analysis of that catastrophe, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, a Beltway libertarian think tank has convened to address the problem that is South Africa.
One day after the South African rand tumbled on the suprising report that president Zuma had ordered his finance minister Pravin Gordhan to cancel roadshow meetings with investors in the UK and US and return home on Monday, overnight the rand plunged for the second day in a row, after the 74 year old president told senior leaders of the South African Communist Party that he plans to fire Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.