TITO MBOWENI FAILED US:DECRY ECONOMISTS

Replacing Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni with the ABSA Chairwoman Gill Marcus has been hailed by various sectors in South Africa, with the most notably delight coming from his former university mate in exile.

The renowned Durban-based businessman,who a Professor of Economics and a Bachelor of Laws graduate Bonke Dumisa has come out smoking and dismissed Mboweni's 10-year tenure in the central bank as dissappointing because 'Mboweni had failed to transform it in line with the democratic government's constitutional agenda.

"Tito Mboweni had become 'too high' for his own good. Mboweni was a politician-turned-bureaucrat who enjoys the status of being perceived as a 'different black'. Mboweni did not enjoy seeing other blacks climbing the hierarchial ladder in their chosen fields.

In most countries, the Reserve Bank is used by young graduates as a training ground and stepping stone to other jobs in both the private sector and the public sector, but Mboweni could hear none of that" observes Dumisa

While the largest umbrella labour federation COSATU had described Mboweni's aloofness to review the inflation targeting policy after persistent calls, Dumisa have traced Mboweni's pompousness back to their college days at Roma University during the worst days of apartheid in South Africa.
Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven had called Mboweni's firing last Sunday by the country's President Jacob Zuma as "good riddance as he was inimical to the country's high unemployment rate, inequalities and interest rates that were having an adverse effect to the working class".

However the serious indictment of him, adds Dumisa, is that after having conceived, drafted and gave political direction to the present day legislation, especially in the labour field, as the first democratically-elected Minister of Finance, Mboweni has failed the previously disadvantaged p
eople.

"We expected Mboweni to be in the forefront of championing the identification, growing, nurturing, and deployment of many future economists and banking executives to make sure our economy and the banking industry are in good hands.
Throughout South Africa, no single economist or bank executive can proudly proclaim that 'today I am a success story because of the motivation and mentoring of Tito Mboweni' " asserts Dumisa.

Apparently, both Mboweni and Dumisa had spent several years during the apartheid era studying at the National University of Lesotho, affectionaely known as 'Roma University' in the 1970's.
Dumisa highlighted that Mboweni was,then, regaling himself as a hardcore communists that eloquently qouted 'Lenin and the dialectical materialism theories', and according to Dumisa, he had dismissed him as an'elementary capitalist simply because he was studying a pure bachelor of commerce'.

Dumisa sums up his seminal critique of Mboweni's leadership as South Africa's central banker over a decade by noting that'Tito Mboweni did not fail, in fact, he was not interested in championing any meaningful transformation at the Reserve Bank'.

Even the Political Science Masters graduate in African political economy Bongani Ngqulunga, now working in the Presidency,Union Buildings, Pretoria, was timid to comment on Mboweni's change of fortunes.
The erstwhile University of Durban-Westville SRC Secretary when Mboweni was appointed as the Reserve Bank Governor, Ngqulunga was instrumental in organising the 'TITO MBOWENI CELEBRATORY BANQUET AS RSA RESERVE BANK GOVERNOR' at the Durban's International Convention Centre.
However, these days he conceeded that the replacement of Mboweni can be construed as a 'project gone wrong'.