By Chris Bishop

President Cyril Ramaphosa said Wednesday that South Africa’s Reserve Bank will be left alone despite concerns that the economy is not creating enough jobs.

The Reserve Bank, a private company with shareholders, manages the country’s monetary policy based around inflation targeting. 

“There is no interest whatsoever to tamper or tinker with the independence of the Reserve Bank,” Ramaphosa said at a pre-Davos breakfast at a Johannesburg hotel.

“Our wish is as it goes about with policy it should keep an eye on the issue of employment.”

The Reserve Bank has cropped up in many political speeches in recent years as the South African economy has struggled. Critics say the central bank should forget about inflation and concentrate on stimulating job creation – an analysis dismissed as facile and unworkable by the people who run the central bank.