ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS' STATEMENT ON THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND VISIT TO SOUTH AFRICA.

Wednesday, 19 December, 2018

The Economic Freedom Fighters notes that the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is currently in South Africa, and has held meetings with the outgoing President of the Republic, the South African Reserve Bank and National Treasury. The EFF strongly advises that the South African Government should not accept any economic advice from the IMF, because it is empirically and historically responsible for economic models and systems that devasted poor nations and condemned poor people to absolute poverty.

The IMF's economic logic wherever it intervenes seeks to create business conditions for the greedy, rapacious and callous multinational corporations, whose interests will never coincide with the interests of ordinary people. The IMF's core belief is that the State should not play a role in economic matters, and what this means for South Africa is that the economically marginalized will forever remain on the margins.

In 1992, the IMF took advantage of South Africa's trade deficit and approved a loan which came with neo-liberal conditionalities. Al those conditionalities constituted an economic policy that kept the black majority, and Africans in particular, as spectators of a slowly expanding white people's economy. Workers did not benefit from the IMF policies, because the Fund was already calling for relaxation of Labour protection laws.

The EFF strongly warns the outgoing government not to take any loan from the IMF, and not to accept any conditionality, despite the growing debt to the GDP ratio. The outgoing government of Cyril Ramaphosa must not commit our country to neo-liberal economic models and policies that have empirically failed in the past.

The IMF must know, as they leave South Africa, that the political party that determines economic policy in South Africa, the EFF, rejects their advances towards South Africa. We will not repeat things that brought us massive unemployment, crisis levels of poverty and the highest inequality in the world. The IMF is not a solution to South Africa and they should leave our country knowing that they are rejected.

Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 19 December 2018