Mboweni tells whites to drop their ‘SA was empty when we got here’ notion

Former governor of the Reserve Bank Tito Mboweni has been quietly getting on with his life despite some of the furore that has erupted after the leaking of the public protector’s report into allegations that Absa and other companies benefited improperly from apartheid-era “lifeboats” from the Reserve Bank worth billions of rands.

Mboweni has consistently denied that he and the South African government did nothing wrong by not pursuing the recommended recovery of offshore funds that former British spy Michael Oatley’s Ciex Report recommended should be recovered.

Instead, Tzaneen native Mboweni has posted photos on Facebook of his quiet life as a farmer in Limpopo.

He also took to Facebook to post photos of his admission to the Haenertsburg/Makgoebaskloof Rotary Club.

Rotary International is a service organisation that says its aim is to bring together business and professional leaders to provide humanitarian services, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and advance goodwill and peace around the world. It has had a presence in South Africa for decades and there are said to be more than 34 000 member clubs worldwide, with about 1.2 million members, who call themselves “Rotarians”.

In his speech at his “induction event”, Mboweni explained that African people needed to be properly situated in the history of South Africa. He said that everyone in the country needed to let go of the incorrect notion that “these Europeans came in [the] Dromedaris and landed in the Cape and just drove through empty land and established … a basis for themselves”.

He said that accepting this fact would help to deal with the “psychological problem about the reconciliation process in South Africa … and that has to do with an acceptance by all of us that in fact this is an African country, which was then occupied by Europeans”.

He then added a reconciliatory note of his own, by referencing Thabo Mbeki’s I Am an African speech that spoke of how he owed “his being” to the richness of different cultures on the continent, among them those from Europe, India “and so on”.

Watch him giving his talk at the Rotary Club below: