In May 2012 the Chairman of a major lobby group the Manufacturing Circle, Stewart Jennings, said in comments to the Business Day that:

“We are ecstatic with the rand’s performance. If it stays there, South Africa will start creating more jobs,”

He was referring to the R/$ exchange rate climbing from 6.60 in August 2011 to 8.40 in May. In fact, the R/$ hasn’t “stayed there”, the Rand has weakened even further against the US dollar to 9.00 at end 2012. Jennings has forever been promoting a weak Rand policy as a job creation policy.

BUT THE ECONOMY SHED NEARLY 70,000 JOBS IN THE FOURTH QUARTER OF 2012 (according to Stats SA estimates).

You cannot trust a crony making economic predictions, who is actually only out to line his and his buddies’ pockets with taxpayer cash. Jennings’ prediction is perfectly wrong. People like Stewart Jennings will say anything that sounds good to get the public on their side, while he is in fact promoting a policy that will protect his and his friends’ businesses, but that will cause countless suffering – through job losses (now reflecting in the data) and resulting lost incomes to households, rising prices for consumers with unchanged salaries, and the destruction of the value of people’s life savings.