Decimal Coinage In South Africa

Press, Volume C, Issue 29437, 13 February 1961, Page 11

Decimal Coinage In South Africa

(Rec. 10 p.m.) PRETORIA, February 12. South Africa will change over officially on Tuesday from a sterling to a decimal finance system, after nearly 16 years of investigation and preparation.

The basic unit, the rand, will have 100 cents, and the International Monetary Fund has set its par value at 10s, or exactly half the present South African pound. Banks throughout the country will open for business on D (for decimal) day with stocks of new coins and notes to exchange for all money, but the complete changeover is expected to take between 15 and 20 months For this period, both currencies will be accepted. To make the changeover easier, banks and other financial institutions, such as the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, w-ill be closed on Monday. The exchange plans to make a number of “dummy runs” on the day decimal currency is introduced to help members and dealers get used to the new system. Investigations into a decimal system in South Africa began in 1945. By 1958 the

third commission to consider the subject recommended a speedy decision, which Parliament took the following year.

Almost immediately a fulltime decimalisation board was set up to prepare a detailed master plan for the change, which has posed tremendous problems. Armies of technicians are already busy adapting accounting machines, cash tills, petrol pumps and other monetary machines throughout South Africa’s 800.000 square miles and the Government will soon begin paying out between £6 million and £7 million in compensation to machine owners.

One of the major problems has been the education of South Africa’s people to the change. This has cost many thousands of pounds. While schools have taught children, a million posters in the English Afrikaans and Bantu languages have explained the change to adults.