SA Minister calls for new order for Global South

Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has taken a swipe at SA’s five largest banks along with the geopolitical world order, while also calling for a new global financial system to be developed to enable non-Western nations to plot their own developmental path. In a speech delivered at the Brics Youth Summit in Durban last week, Dlamini-Zuma – Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth & People with Disabilities – called on participants to reimagine an ‘alternative banking and financing architecture’ for the Global South. Business Day reports that she said attendees had a responsibility to ‘break’ society’s acceptance of ‘rentier capitalism as an accepted orthodoxy’. She made scathing references to colonial conquests, and said Brics nations have the potential to change the course of history and accelerate the downfall of an ‘unjust imperialist world order’. ‘In SA, we are forced to kneel before five banks,’ Dlamini-Zuma said. ‘This represents some of the most concentrated banking systems in the world. The greater concentration of banking to the big five has clearly undermined accountability, hindered development, stifled competition and passed on the cost burden to citizens.’ She added: ‘We now have a structural problem of a banking industry that is not only greatly concentrated and monopolised, but also in many ways does not serve our interests. We need an alternative public banking and finance system beyond the dominant one, and we need it urgently. Without control over finance and banking, only those projects that converge with the interest of private interests will be funded while the interests of the communities we serve take a back seat.’ While Dlamini-Zuma said the New Development Bank is a step in the right direction, she noted that there is an urgent need to ‘domesticate alternative banking as a matter of urgency’.

Full Business Day report