By:Dr Duarte F da Silva -  is a capital markets strategist and managing director of Northbound Processing

One morning in February 2022 a G20 central bank woke to find roughly $300bn of its reserves switched off. Not seized in a raid. Not lost in a market. Switched off — by the countries whose currencies it had trusted. Every reserve manager alive learnt it before lunch: a dollar reserve is someone else’s promise, and promises break. Gold makes none. It cannot be switched off. That is the wire every open economy walks. The rest of the world answered by stringing a net, and has spent four years buying it with both hands.

They took over a thousand tonnes in 2022. Over a thousand in 2023. Over a thousand in 2024. Another 863 last year. Poland took 102 tonnes, Kazakhstan a record 57, Brazil 43, Turkey and China 27 apiece — and the World Gold Council believes half of last year’s official buying was never declared. Ninety-five per cent of those it surveyed intend to keep going. Late in 2025 gold overtook US Treasuries as the largest reserve asset on the planet.

South Africa bought nothing.

Not last year. Not the year before. Not once since 2003.

The arc is the indictment. In 2005 the Reserve Bank held about 125 tonnes. Today it holds about 125 tonnes. In those same twenty years Russia went from under 400 tonnes past 2,300. China went from 600 to more than 2,300. India went from 358 to 880. Brazil multiplied its holding fivefold. Four of the five BRICS members spent two decades buying the insurance. The fifth — the country that has pulled more gold out of the ground than any nation in human history — moved by one tonne. A rounding error. Not a decision.

When did we last decide anything? In December 2000 the Bank held 183.5 tonnes. By September 2003, 123.5. We sold sixty tonnes for something like $580m, with gold near $300 an ounce. That same metal is worth $7.7bn today. We sold the net at the bottom and pocketed the change.

We were not alone at the bottom, and that is the part that stings. Switzerland dumped 1,550 tonnes. Britain sold the 395 the market still laughs at as Brown’s Bottom. But those were rich men selling off mountains and keeping mountains. Our actual peers, the emerging producers, sold nothing, and they lead the buying now. We were the one gold nation in that club. We sold a fifth of a molehill and never came back. Thirty-second in the world, second in Africa, behind Algeria.

Then came Budget 2024, and the part nobody will name. The Treasury reached into the Gold and Foreign Exchange Contingency Reserve Account — the buffer holding the revaluation gains on our gold, swollen because gold had soared — and pulled out R150bn. Structured with the Reserve Bank. Ring-fenced. Defended by serious people. Be plain about the direction: at the exact moment every peer turned cash into gold, South Africa turned the gains on its gold into cash and spent them.

That is not reserve management. That is eating the seed corn and calling it a harvest.

Argue with me on strategy if you like. Reserves are for liquidity, gold yields nothing, and a bank piling into a risen asset is chasing performance. There is force in that, and nobody is asking anyone to back the rand with bullion. But notice what it defends: only the decision not to buy more. It says nothing about selling at the bottom, or draining the buffer to pay the bills.

And we are no bystander on this wire. A twice-downgraded currency, open talk of leaving the dollar, contested access to the American market: the risk gold insures sits closer to us than to most of the buyers.

Count what we spent instead. Cyril Ramaphosa puts state capture above R500bn. At today’s price that money buys 230 tonnes of bullion — almost twice everything the nation owns. Add the R150bn we drained, another 69 tonnes, to the 125 we hold, and the country could be sitting on 424 tonnes: more than Kazakhstan or the United Kingdom, from money we already had.

And 230 tonnes flatters us, because that is what R500bn buys today. The money went between 2009 and 2018, when gold averaged about $1,300 an ounce and the rand about eleven. Bought then, it was nearer eleven hundred tonnes — nine times the national reserve, worth over R2 trillion now. We lost the money and the compounding both.

Nor will the savers hold it. Regulation 28 lets a pension fund put 10% into gold. Through the PIC, the Government Employees Pension Fund owns some R260bn of our gold miners and no bullion at all: long the mine, flat the metal.

At the other end of the metal, the state is making sure there is nothing left to buy. Seven hundred of 795 prospecting applications refused last year. A cadastre working in one province out of nine. Exploration down from R6.2bn to R738m. R1.77bn on Vala Umgodi, 18,000 arrests, not one senior conviction — and at Stilfontein at least 78 men who went down and came up dead. We spend to stop the gold coming out, and spend rather than put gold in. From Germiston, where the headgear still stands over shafts nobody may reopen, the logic cannot be reconstructed.

The fix costs nothing. Ring-fence the revaluation account: those gains are insurance, not income. Adopt what 48% of emerging-market central banks already have. Then the elegant part: a country that still mines gold can buy its own production into reserves, in rand, without spending a dollar. The mine fills the vault. Godongwana can protect the buffer he raided. Kganyago can start buying. The minerals ministry can licence the gold to buy.

None of it needs a new law. It needs someone to want it. We are the richest gold nation on earth and we conduct ourselves like a country with none. The wire does not get safer because we refuse to look down. String the net.