South Africa’s Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba on Tuesday announced that the government will not seek money from the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) to bail out the country’s failing state-owned enterprises.
“I want to assure every South African, every pension holder that their pensions are safe, that there is absolutely no attempt to dig into their pensions for reasons that are unscrupulous,” Gigaba told a media briefing at the National Treasury in Pretoria.
Gigaba comments came following reports that the National Treasury was trying to force PIC to commit to providing close to US$7.5 billion to bail out struggling state-owned enterprises, including the embattled South African Airways.
Pretoria-based PIC has almost US$150 billion in assets, and handles pension funds for South African state workers, including nurses and teachers.
Its holdings value is an equivalent of about 13 percent of the market value of companies that trade on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE).
A precedent for the PIC to help out came in 2015, when the money manager bought the state’s 25 billion-rand stake in wireless carrier Vodacom Group Ltd. to raise funds for Eskom.
