Long read | What the GNU is up to with digitalisation

As part of a broader global programme, the plan is to consolidate Digital ID with Central Bank Digital Currencies, and create a global central planning doctrine backed up by universal surveillance. But there is a way out.

Since the advent of the GNU, a particular set of policies have been rammed through which harmonise the private banking cartel with SARS, the SARB, and the Department of Home Affairs to create a centrally controlled biometric identity system. While this doesn’t appear all that radical on its own (especially given our own little challenges), the broader policy programme is tied in the long term to a novel financial instrument called a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a crypto-currency system whose ledger is centrally programmable, turning the money we use into tokens whose use can be made time-limited, or directed to be spent on only certain items, effectively destroying property rights entirely.

CBDCs are the most advanced and quantified element of the overall reform, with 134 countries and currency unions actively exploring or developing them, encompassing 98% of global GDP. Of these, 72 are in advanced stages (development, pilot, or launch), including 49 pilots and three full retail launches (Bahamas, Jamaica, Nigeria). Among G20 nations, 19 are exploring, with 16 in development or piloting. This reflects a near-universal push, tempered by outliers like the United States, where a 2025 executive order halted retail efforts.

South Africa was a laggard in this regard, and perhaps the one thing that can be said in favour of the ANC is their stubborn reluctance to even begin the process, with the SARB regarding the reforms as unnecessary, until the GNU was enacted, whereupon they have set about integrating South Africa into a centralised system of digital control whose precedent has never been seen.

These two elements (digital ID and CBDC) are planned to work together, so that the central ledger, operated by the global central banking system, is universally interoperable, and can be made to conform to a single specified economic plan or to political controls. The digital identity would link to the digital currency accounts to confirm who is making a payment and ensure it follows set rules, such as limits on amounts or types of use. For instance, the Bank for International Settlements has stated that such currencies would be account-based and tied to a person’s electronic identity to manage access and rules. This integration is part of broader efforts by groups like the United Nations and the World Bank, under goals set in 2015 to give everyone a legal identity by 2030, including through digital means. Their Identification for Development initiative supports building these systems in about 186 countries, with only a few left without basic setups.

The program is presented as a way to reduce fraud, improve access to banking for those without traditional papers, and make cross-border trade faster. Central banks in over 130 countries are researching or testing these currencies, covering nearly all global economic activity. In the EU, the digital identity framework is set to take effect soon after approval, and the digital euro could launch by 2029. In the UK, the BritCard rollout might begin in phases from 2027, starting with employment and housing checks. Funding and technical support come from organizations like the Gates Foundation and companies involved in data systems.

In Europe, it has been suggested that people’s ability to pay for goods and services will be curtailed at the individual level to limit carbon emissions, and the DA has enthusiastically endorsed similarly draconian climate laws already, in the form of the Climate Change Act and are looking to introduce British-style “15-minute city” reforms in the City of Cape Town.

A persistent problem with government is that over time, governments expand. From 5% of the economy in peacetime a hundred-odd years ago, the state now occupied 1/3 to a half of most countries’ economies. As governments grow, they become more bloated, inefficient and bureaucratic, whether they are communist or not, and in democracies and dictatorships alike, eventually a point is reached where the dishing out of spoils required to compete for control becomes too expensive to maintain, and citizens start dodging taxes. In the past, this pattern forced reforms or a withering away of the state, as empires gave way to smaller more efficient local polities.

But in the modern era, we will be seeing a permanent locking-in of taxation which will continue levelling the wealth and income of all but the highest of international elites and kicking away the ladder to advancement permanently, increasing control and patronage, and profit- and vanity-driven social engineering will take on an unreastricted character. Once certain controls are implemented, any desire for freedom or change will be meaningless.

You can say what you like in a public forum, but it is mainly those who show a propensity for creating organised resistance or competition who will be targeted, much as happens in the UK and EU. Freedom of speech is utterly meaningless, as is democratic party politics. Debanking has already become a favourite weapon, and was tested out on a number of fringe political activists in the past five years across the West, though it has been standard practice in China for a fair bit longer.

 
Central, international, top-down

The rollout of CBDCs is not a grassroots innovation born from isolated national brainstorming. Rather, it stems from a coordinated, supranational policy ecosystem orchestrated by institutions like the BIS, IMF, WEF, UN, EU, and G20. These bodies, often in partnership with private sector entities and “philanthropies”, have authored foundational reports and roadmaps since the late 2010s, framing digital finance and identity as essential public goods for inclusion, efficiency, and stability.

Since Digital ID is mainly a government issue, and CBDCs a banking instrument, the two halves of the policy programme have been pushed through different processes, the former mostly through the UN and other intergovernmental bodies, and the latter through the BIS.

The 2030 Agenda, which cemented these changes, was negotiated over two years (2013–2015) by the Open Working Group (OWG) on SDGs, co-chaired by Kenya and Hungary, with input from pre-selected and friendly civil society, academic, and private sector stakeholders. Key development came from the World Bank’s ID4D Initiative, which was launched 2014, and provided data estimating 1.1 billion people lacked proof of legal identity, mostly in Africa and Asia. It was adopted on September 25, 2015, via UN Resolution A/RES/70/1, titled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. The resolution was adopted by consensus, meaning it was approved without a formal vote, but in UN practice, consensus adoption occurs when no delegation objects after extensive negotiations, meaning not a single treaty signatory objected. None of this policy was subject to public scrutiny in any of the member countries, and has been made legally binding in every territory on earth without any public assent, and little to no media coverage at the time.

These institutions and compliant governments around the world exploited the 2020 COVID lockdowns as a policy “macrowindow” through which to shove an accelerated reform toward the permanent installation of a totalising digital biometric control system for the world’s population which could be controlled and managed from a central point, aligning with the UN’s Agenda 2030 SDGs, particularly SDG 16.9 on universal legal identity by 2030.

UNICEF and WHO emphasized birth registration gaps as the key humanitarian concern and provided ideological cover in this particular form, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, and McKinsey & Company funded research framing digital ID as a mechanism which would enable 3–13% GDP growth, a clearly ludicrous estimate, and media and research outlets downstream of this policy ecosystem have mostly parroted the rosy propaganda produced by its main beneficiaries – tech companies, biotech firms and bureaucrats.

But this was just the final legislative process. The policy has been in a long slow pipeline for nearly 40 years, if one were to mark the first rough conceptual points. Over time, it picked up baggage, and become more of a multitool to synthesise a single universal policy enforcement mechanism.

 
The importance of the Great Recession

The origins of CBDCs can be traced back to the late 1980s, when economist James Tobin first proposed the concept of a deposit-free electronic money system to enhance monetary policy transmission and reduce the costs associated with physical cash handling. This soon turned into the into digital central bank liabilities policy. The long-term vision is one in which all banking is done through the Central Banking system, but in the meantime, private banks are encouraged to consolidate into more and more concentrated and manipulable blocs of state partners.

In the 1990s there were some early experiments, such as the Bank of Finland’s Avant card, a stored-value e-money prototype issued in collaboration with private banks, which functioned as an early form of programmable central bank money but was eventually discontinued due to technological limitations and low adoption.

But the Nordic countries still pushed ahead, just starting more modestly, with the displacement of physical cash. Sweden began to prompt informal discussions among central bankers about preserving public access to sovereign money, worried about private sector dominance in payments.

But none of this really was seen as urgent until after the financial crash in 2007/08. While many got a bit panicky about the WEF slogan “the Great Reset”, which came to be the popular scare-brand for these digitalisation policies, the origins of the idea lie in a 2009 book by Richard Florida (called The Great Reset), which argued that the 2008 crash was not just a financial crisis but a transformative rupture ending the debt-fueled, suburban, consumption-driven economic order. Like earlier resets after the 1870s and 1930s depressions, this one demanded a new spatial and economic model centered on dense, innovative cities (densification was part of the UN’s Agenda 21 from 1992 already, so elites were receptive to this). Creative-class hubs will drive growth through knowledge, culture, and connectivity, while sprawling suburbs and big-box retail fade in favour of delivery services.

The other half of the thinking on this comes from rentier-turn theorists – those who believed that globalization’s easy profits (cheap offshore labor, seamless capital flows, and trade-fueled growth) had run their course, leaving elites to safeguard unearned income through financial engineering, intellectual-property enclosures, real-estate inflation, and debt extraction. Many prominent economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, and even UNCTAD, pointed out that the easy gains from globalisation, offshoring and cheap credit had dried up, and that the future gains lay in a rentier economy where elites would have to pursue regulatory capture and cynical exploitation to extract wealth from the broader public by impoverishing them. There was a brief moment where bailed-out capital flowed out of the West to emerging markets, but then they in turn collapsed a few years later as growth did not meet expectations.

Florida never mentions digital currencies, but he pinpoints the monetary vacuum that CBDCs would later fill. Credit had seized up, velocity had collapsed, and capital still chased low-density assets like dying malls and overleveraged McMansions while creative-class hubs starved for liquidity (sounds like where South Africa is now). A new transmission mechanism was needed to steer money precisely into “high-productivity urban nodes” – in other words, a Soviet-style central planning model driven by the banking system. CBDCs supply exactly that mechanism. For the rentier class, programmable digital cash offers granular control: central banks can geo-fence stimulus to downtown zip codes, green zones, or licensed platforms, bypassing cash and shadow banking that erode seigniorage and data rents. Expiring balances, negative rates, or spending mandates force velocity into assets rentiers already own, like city-center real estate, SaaS subscriptions, patented algorithms, and for the bureaucrats, green energy and carbon rationing.

Transaction-level surveillance becomes a fresh rent stream, what the BIS quietly calls a “data dividend.” At the wholesale level, cross-border CBDC corridors like mBridge or Project Agorá let the Fed and ECB settle trade in digital dollars or euros, preserving exorbitant privilege in the face of de-dollarization threats. This is explicit: BIS Innovation Hub reports describe CBDCs as programmable platforms for a fragmented, post-crisis monetary order. The IMF’s CBDC Virtual Handbook explicitly frames them as resilience against the financial-plumbing failures exposed in 2008.

The Atlantic Council notes that eighty percent of G20 central banks cite “monetary sovereignty” in a de-globalizing world, but the policy pushes not for sovereign state control of the banking system, but of Central Bank control expansion – “independence” is a tracked metric on a scale from 0-1, and an “independent CB is effectively one directly controlled by the BIS. China’s e-CNY white paper positions the digital yuan as an upgrade for a “new development pattern” once export-led growth peaked.

In essence, 2008 ended the globalization-credit-suburb complex and the arbitrage of global imbalances alike. The new frontier is urban knowledge rents fused with digital enclosure. CBDCs are the monetary operating system for that frontier: they pump programmable liquidity into rent-bearing nodes, harvest every transaction as surveillance rent, and lock out cash-based resistance. Far from an inclusion project, CBDC is the financial spine of a post-2008 urban-rentier order—programmable, surveilled, and sovereign.

 
The march of progress

The emergence of Bitcoin in 2009 acted as a disruptive catalyst, and the timing, following the financial crisis, have prompted some skeptics to suggest that Bitcoin itself is a government experiment with digital currencies, usually citing the NSA’s 1996 paper “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash”. The theory goes that Bitcoin was an experiment to deploy this tech publicly, collecting metadata on transactions for signals intelligence (SIGINT), and Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system supposedly echoes Hashcash (not that I would know – claims like this are a bit above my skillset). The US government now holds somewhere between 190-350k Bitcoin itself, so they’re clearly hedging their bets to some degree.

But China was the first after the Nordics to take a real swing at getting the thing done. In 2014, China’s People’s Bank of China (PBOC) established a dedicated research group to explore a sovereign digital yuan, marking the first major institutional commitment to CBDC development and driven by geopolitical ambitions to modernize cross-border payments while countering dollar hegemony. This was coordinated through early BIS forums, and shaped global standards for preventing fragmentation in digital finance.

Then we have the 2016 BIS paper on “Innovation in Payments,” which formalized CBDC as a policy priority and urged central banks to experiment with distributed ledger technologies to maintain monetary sovereignty against private stablecoins – private digital currencies allowing private users to hedge their assets against physical commodities and global currencies with novel independent instruments. Sweden’s Riksbank publicly announced its e-krona project in 2017, since cash transactions were now below 1% of GDP, and bypassed public and legislative scrutiny entirely.

The BIS’s Foundational Principles and Core Features, issued by the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), with input from 28 central banks including the Federal Reserve, ECB, and Bank of England, was the first major CBDC policy paper. Its foundational principles are somewhat vague (stability, efficiency, interoperability), but basically mean they give the system the ability to rapidly intervene in the market to bail out investors or stop financial flows, cut costs for banks, and create a single global standard system. It influenced early pilots, such as Sweden’s e-krona (2019), by framing CBDCs as “public money” for innovation without “disrupting sovereignty” (of course, that promise only lasts as long as it is necessary to gain trust).

They also tried pitching it as a means for affirmative action – see The Fintech Gender Gap and Central Bank Digital Currencies from the IMF. But it also proposes tiered ledgers (central bank issues, private sector distributes) and privacy tiers mimicking cash. Most interestingly, they push macro-financial uses, such as using CBDCs for targeted stimulus (very lucrative for the well-connected), and for aid to emerging markets (foreshadowing IMF technical aid to developing countries).

By 2018, G20 finance ministers, alarmed by $35 billion in annual remittance fees (6.8% average cost), tasked the Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a payments overhaul. This birthed the Roadmap, embedding CBDCs as “Building Block 19” for interoperability. This was published in 2020, by a collaboration between the FSB, CPMI, World Bank and BIS. Coming at the same time as the massive population control and surveillance drive around COVID, the downstream discussion of the policy after the 2020 Riyadh Summit is what triggered the main public reaction.

The World Bank and UN’s Digital Identity Push (2017–2020) saw Digital IDs as “inseparable” from CBDCs, following BIS and IMF guidance. This formal policy link originated in development agendas to combat the 1 billion “identity gap” – the World Bank’s ID4D (launched 2014) and UN’s SDG 16.9 converged on modular, biometric systems, but were only formally integrated into the CBDC policy framework by 2020. For this, see 2018’s World Bank Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development: Toward the Digital Age, endorsed by 30+ organizations including UN and Gates Foundation. It promotes biometrics and Gates-funded tech like MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform). Updated in 2021 post-consultations, it influenced 50+ countries’ diagnostics, tying IDs to payments and welfare. Shortly afterwards, the UN Department Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and UNHCR, with World Bank input, published the Handbook on the Legal, Regulatory and Technical Framework for Legal Identity. This 100-page guide set the deadline for 2030, advocating digital CRVS (civil registration) with biometrics for 60+ SDG indicators, stressing integration with financial systems, enabling surveillance via linked services.

The WEF’s Integration of CBDC and Digital ID bridged these into a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” narrative, emphasising private-public fusion. They value digital ID at 3–13% of GDP by 2030, parotting Gates’ estimate. Blockchain was pushed for privacy, but the backdoors mentioned above, and the centralisation of the ledgers mean this is not really as advertised. Here we see more excitement over “programmable money” tied to IDs. All of this talks endlessly about the risks of letting different countries have their own financial systems.

These documents form a policy flywheel: BIS/IMF provide technical blueprints, G20 enforces timelines, World Bank/UN fund pilots, and WEF rallies corporates. National adaptations, like South Africa’s SARB Vision 2025 or EU’s Digital Euro proposal, explicitly reference them, often via IMF capacity-building.

A big trigger event came in 2019 with Facebook’s “Libra” announcement, which created a global regulatory panic over private digital currencies eroding central bank monopolies, which the G7 and G20 used to frame CBDCs as an urgent defensive tool. Closed-door IMF and BIS meetings propelled over 40 countries into exploratory phases by 2020, with the BIS, IMF and others dictating design principles like programmability (allowing governments to impose spending restrictions and expiry dates for currency). The COVID-19 lockdowns massively accelerated these reforms, especially digital payment and Digital ID, focusing on cross-border inefficiencies and population control and surveillance, in explicit terms.

The BIS launched its Innovation Hub and mBridge project, a multi-CBDC platform involving China, UAE, Thailand, and Hong Kong, to test interoperability (meaning, trading seamlessly on the same universal ledger) and tokenized trade. The Bahamas debuted the world’s first retail CBDC, the Sand Dollar, in October 2020, touted for “financial inclusion” (getting everyone on the same platform) but they were lambasted for enabling real-time transaction monitoring that favored state oversight over user anonymity. Only ~0.3-1% of population used the Sand Dollar as of 2024, with only BSD 1.9m in circulation vs. BSD 588M in cash. Technical hurdles limited implementation, but also trust issues: excessive surveillance, erosion of privacy, coercive state control over money. So now they’re drawing up legislation to make it mandatory. Nigeria followed with the eNaira in October 2021, driven by IMF-backed pilots. While there isn’t a direct coercive element here, these pilots were pushed in advisory fora, and the IMF has considerable oversight for loan repayment in debtor countries.

Project Dunbar, a dry-run for inter-bank level transactions, was run in 2021–2022 by the BIS Innovation Hub’s Singapore Centre (the South African Reserve Bank was a participant). The project targeted G20 priorities by addressing three core design challenges: restricting CBDC access to vetted institutions, preserving transaction privacy while ensuring “anti-money laundering” compliance through selective disclosure (verifying customer identities, monitoring transactions for large or rapid transfers, flagging to authorities, driven by FATF), and establishing governance via smart contracts to foster trust. Two distributed ledger technology prototypes were found to be successful.

By 2022, a BIS survey revealed 93% of central banks actively exploring CBDCs, up from 35 countries two years prior, with half in concrete experiments, a surge attributed to the IMF’s Digital Money Strategy, which prioritized capacity building in 30 nations while prioritizing “systemically important” economies to avert a “digital divide” that could fragment global finance. CBDCs are designated by the G20 and G7 as essential for “financial stability”, which adds a great deal of momentum, and these fora govern the FATF, which recently lifted the financial greylist from South Africa, which has (of course, just coincidentally) recently begun implementing the main pillars of the digitalisation reforms.

From 2023 to now, these programmes have started to mature from pilots into operational frameworks, with the IMF publishing a comprehensive CBDC Handbook in phases, covering design, resilience, and cross-border implications, while collaborating with the World Bank on technical assistance that often conditioned funding on adoption milestones. None of this involved public consultation, because this is an extremely distrusted and unpopular reform. Informal alliances between central banks and fintechs embedded backdoor data-sharing from the outset.
So this stuff won’t be particularly secure, and various government departments can intervene to target political dissidents.

Currently, the U.S. stands as a notable outlier after President Trump’s executive order halting retail CBDC work, a move framed as safeguarding sovereignty. Of course, critics have said this means yielding ground to China’s e-CNY dominance in transaction volume. But it doesn’t seem to hold much benefit for ordinary people to push this stuff to retail, so the argument doesn’t really hold that much water.

You can watch the progress of the whole policy worldwide from the Atlantic Council website. They have nice interactive maps:

 
South Africa

South Africa’s programme, integrating CBDC exploration, biometric digital IDs, and real-time payments like PayShap, has been enthusiastically pursued by the DA, and only begin with the GNU.
Before then, the ANC heavily dragged their heels. This is much to their credit, and might well be the one thing I can say in their favour. But Ramaphosa himself has been rather enthusiastic, and pushed for these reforms from the moment he got in, carried by a wave of bribery and corruption which bought him the ANC’s 2017 party presidency.

The SARB’s National Payment System Department and their Payments and Settlements team developed the groundwork in 2018
in consultation with the main banks and fintechs. They set an “overarching industry vision” for a world-class national payment system by 2025, aligned with the National Development Plan’s goals for economic inclusion. It identifies nine strategic objectives including the usual concepts like “financial inclusion” (eliminating cash use), ensuring safety and efficiency, and (again) “fostering interoperability”. CBDCs are not explicitly named but implied under “new technologies” like DLT; financial inclusion is prioritised to tackle unemployment and inequality indirectly. At the same time, Project Khokha was launched (a blockchain pilot for settling interbank transactions), and followed it up with by Project Khokha 2 (our component of Project Dunbar) in 2021 and 2022, to test international compatibility.

A separate study on a retail CBDC, completed in 2023, concluded that the risks (such as pulling deposits away from commercial banks, enabling bank runs, and eroding privacy) far outweigh the benefits at this stage. Governor Lesetja Kganyago, to his credit, has repeatedly stated that there is no compelling case for a digital rand available to the public, especially when systems like PayShap already handle over a million instant, low-cost transactions daily. South Africa has, however, built the infrastructure that would make a future CBDC rollout feasible if policy ever shifts.
But since then, the SARB has been running a live wholesale CBDC pilot with major South African banks, which is set to run through 2026.

The Digital Payments Roadmap came out a few months before the national election last year, written in collaboration with the Payments Association of South Africa (a “self-regulation” forum of all major South African banks, mutual banks, foreign bank branches), and builds directly on Vision 2025’s Action Plan. It addresses “sluggish” digital adoption, proposing measures like two-factor authentication, a digital KYC registry for identity verification, and end-to-end digitisation of government payments, by pushing biometric checks for receiving grant payments. It extended retail CBDC feasibility studies like the Dunbar Project for two more years, alongside wholesale CBDC use cases, stablecoin sandboxes, and tokenisation. Emphasis is on financial inclusion again, with biometrics enabling secure, low-cost access. Risks like fraud and exclusion are acknowledged, but the focus is collaborative implementation with fintechs and mobile operators.

Since the DA has taken over key departments, they have aggressively driven these digitalisation policies, especially Leon Schreiber in the Department of Home Affairs, where he has privatised several functions out to a small cartel of private banks who are integrating into the digitalised currency platform with SARS and the SARS. The DHA 2025-2030 Strategic Plan, written by Leon Schreiber in partnership with the SARB, is all about mandating biometric upgrades (facial recognition, fingerprints) for IDs, passports, and visas, and pitched the single digital ID system co-developed with SARB for integration with banking and tax systems. Dean McPherson has invited the UK government to help him digitise payments and operations in the DPWI, and Dion George in the DFFE has pushed carbon credit systems.

The SARB claims that it has “no plans” to issue a retail CBDC in the “near future”, but this is mainly because they have so much foundational work to do before they can even pilot the policy like the Scandinavians were doing ten years ago. They’re focusing instead on using digital currency technology in interbank settlements. They believe that existing payment systems, such as PayShap and mobile money, already meet most functional needs, and just need to be adopted more broadly. PayShap is mainly seen as an on- and off-ramp platform for regular cash.

The SARB recently acquired a 50% stake in the newly rebranded PayInc SA, giving it direct influence over the country’s core payment processing infrastructure. Compared to other African nations, South Africa is ahead in technical readiness but there is reluctance from ANC brass. Nigeria launched its eNaira in 2021, and Ghana is piloting its eCedi with biometric ties, but South Africa is still focusing on behind-the-scenes efficiency.

 
So why do governments comply – the NGOs

There’s no accounting for the DA here, who are willing participants in anything that looks fashionable, no matter how stupid, but how did it come to be that every single country on earth has gone for this? After all, the Central Banks are supposedly “independent”, and the UN has no enforcement mechanisms – no police force, no tax authority, and no power to arrest a president or seize a budget. Yet in South Africa, its SDGs have quietly become part of everyday government life, from clinic upgrades, to budget lines, court orders, even protest slogans – the SARB is pushing CBDCs, and the NDP is mapped to the UN’s vision for 2030.

The main vector is NGOs and the South African Constitution itself. In 2016, the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) in Pretoria published the National Development Plan 2030, a 400-page blueprint that explicitly maps every chapter to one or more SDGs. The NDP is not a UN document; it is South Africa’s own policy, approved by Cabinet and Parliament. But because the 1996 Constitution already guarantees socio-economic rights (clean water, health care, education, housing) many SDGs become legally enforceable the moment a citizen can show that a government department is failing to deliver.

NGOs make maximum use of this opening, and attack the government for failure to meet any of these targets. This is done through what is called “data production”. NGOs collect their own numbers on what is going on across the country, lobby the government for aligned policies, like BELA, the NHI or the Climate Change Act, and use lawfare and protest action to crush policies they don’t like. Sometimes these are innocuous or even good, but overall, they make life very difficult for countries that don’t want to constantly be checking for global governance compliance.

Verified South African NGOs and civil society organizations actively lobby for SDG targets through budget analysis, tracking spending gaps, and pushing fiscal policies aligned with SDGs. While full line-by-line SDG tagging of the national budget remains primarily a government tool (e.g., Stats SA’s Goal Tracker, National Treasury’s gender/climate tagging pilots), these groups perform targeted tracking (gender/climate budgets) and collective advocacy via submissions, reports, and UN processes to enforce accountability. Several websites funded by major international NGOs exist just to do SDG tracking, like south-africa.goaltracker.org, which was formed in partnership with the Swedish government to track 128 of the 199 SDG targets. The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) leads deep dives into national budgets, attacking the government for “austerity” for undermining SDG 1/10, and partner on UN submissions tying fiscal policy to economic rights.

SECTION27 litigates and tracks health/education spending shortfalls, and has pushed for the NHI and BELA, and even appear to have had some influence in the drafting of these Acts. They do human rights impact assessments of budgets with IEJ as well. Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII) analyzes fiscal policies for inequality reduction (SDG 10/1), producing metrics and reviews, while Oxfam South Africa campaigns for “economic justice”, tax reforms, and climate change policies. They are also partnered with IEJ. Alternative Information & Development Centre (AIDC) monitors corporate budget influence and pushes more aggressive taxation and profligate budgets.

These organisations and a dozen others fall under the Budget Justice Coalition (BJC) to jointly review budgets, submit to Parliament and the UN, oppose budget cuts, and demand wealth redistribution.

Lawfare is also a major component, and SECTION27 is the most litigious. In 2024 alone, they secured five court victories on healthcare access, child protection, and “climate justice”; past wins include Life Esidimeni inquest (mental health rights), Michael Komape sanitation case (ruling schools must provide safe toilets, influencing national norms), and Textbooks Case (forcing delivery to millions). These compelled billions in reallocated budgets and inspired the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill (2024), incorporating their infrastructure standards. But this cluster have had a major impact, and contributed directly to the formation of several legislative items in Ramaphosa’s NDR initiative.

How much of a difference this makes to the end result given the poor enforcement capacity we have and the massive corruption in all state departments remains to be seen, but the net effect is certainly not positive.

And the thing is, these organisations have shared members with organisations around the world, and share resources with European states, the American government, the UN, and others. Their funding is tied to organisations with intelligence links and major transnational NGOs, so that they have direct leverage related to policy formation, and can use their lawfare projects as leverage in coordination with media outlets and foreign diplomats. This is not coercive, but is enormously influential.

 
Central Banks

With Central Banks, the mechanisms are less clear, but are much heavier. After all, they control the value of currencies and the flow and price of credit. In many cases, they can induce boom, bust, and bailout cycles, to extract structural reforms from governments, consolidate banking sectors, and erode national sovereignty. This is not conspiracy; it is institutional strategy, documented in a number of statutes and policy briefs. The BIS, headquartered in Basel, sits at the apex of this system. Founded in 1930 to manage German reparations, it has become the governing body for 63 monetary authorities representing 95% of global GDP. Its mission, per its statutes, is to foster cooperation, though in practice it’s more about standardisation and compliance.

Under the 1930 Hague Agreement and its 1987 accord with Switzerland, its premises are inviolable, its archives untouchable, and its staff shielded by diplomatic privilege. It publishes no client names, no transaction details. Central banks can move billions in gold or foreign exchange through Basel without trace, tax, or sanction. This little treaty insulates central banks from democratic oversight while amplifying their collective influence. The BIS does not issue orders, but it does coordinate much of these approaches. Its Basel Accords set capital rules adopted by over 100 countries.

While it tends to be a bit of a rich turf for conspiracy theory, there are a few concrete cases of Central Banks manipulating currencies to force macro-reforms. Japan is one of the best-known case studies. In the 1980s, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) used the old policy of “window guidance” (direct credit quotas), which were used to guide local industrial development in the postwar era, but these powers were used to triple lending for real estate and stocks. The Nikkei surged 400%, land prices 500%, refusing to stick to the careful industrially-focused policy the state had established in more cooperative periods.

Then, in 1989, Governor Yasushi Mieno abruptly slashed quotas by half and hiked rates to 6%. The bubble burst, leaving ¥1,500 trillion in bad loans. For a decade, the BoJ refused bailouts, forcing bank mergers and the “Big Bang” deregulation of 1996–2001. The Ministry of Finance lost its grip on banking supervision. In 1998, the Diet (Japanese Parliament) passed the New BoJ Law, granting the central bank extraordinary levels of independence.

In Princes of the Yen (2003), Richard Werner argues that the BoJ used these strategies not primarily for economic stability, but as a strategic tool to gain direct control over credit allocation to force structural change in Japan’s economy, specifically, to break the power of the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and “keiretsu” conglomerates (the main captains of industry). The BoJ sought full independence from MoF oversight of its policy and personnel, along with the removal of legal constraints on its ability to intervene in credit markets. Werner cites leaked sources and BoJ insiders to a fairly large extent, and it seems this was consciously planned.

With this power, the BoJ aimed to shift from MoF-guided “window guidance” and ultimately wanted to replace the export-led, manufacturing-heavy, keiretsu-dominated system with a domestic demand-led, SME-driven, service-oriented economy. It intended to force “creative destruction” by starving large firms of easy credit, triggering bankruptcies and restructuring. Werner cites internal BoJ documents from the 1990s advocating credit control for structural reform, the BoJ’s deliberate tightening of window guidance in 1989–91 that burst the bubble and weakened MoF-aligned banks, its opposition to bailouts of big banks in the 1990s (preferring failure to force consolidation and reform), and its post-independence actions after the 1998 BoJ Law, when it resisted fiscal stimulus and kept credit tight.

This sort of thing happened in the West too, more or less. The Federal Reserve followed a similar script. In the 1990s, Alan Greenspan kept rates low, fuelling the dot-com bubble. When it crashed in 2000, the Fed stood aside as consolidation swept the sector. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed Glass-Steagall, allowing Citigroup to merge with Travelers, and by 2008, the top five U.S. banks controlled 44% of deposits, up from 20% in 1990. The Fed’s balance sheet ballooned from $900 billion to $9 trillion in response to the global financial crisis, but the real winner was central bank authority: no president could fire the chair, and Congress’s audit powers remained symbolic. The European Central Bank (ECB) refined the model during the euro-zone debt crisis. In 2011, President Jean-Claude Trichet raised rates twice despite Greek and Irish contagion. The result: bond yields spiked, governments buckled. Mario Draghi’s 2012 “whatever it takes” pledge came with strings—Greece surrendered fiscal sovereignty to the Troika; Italy and Spain implemented labour reforms under duress. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a permanent bailout fund, centralised fiscal oversight. National parliaments lost control over budgets to the ECB.

What is interesting here, is that after this destructive reform, the Keiretsu issued a reform demand for an opening of the borders to cheap foreign labour, in 2002. It took over 20 years for them to get what they wanted from the Japanese political system, and now the tide of populism has stymied them again. But you can see similar behaviour in other places like the US and EU, which were soon followed by rapid expansions of cheap labour to keep the economy afloat – mass migration allows one to absorb the inflation from quantitative easing policies, something which Boris Johnson recently admitted was the reason for the unprecedented “Boriswave” of mass migration to the UK under his watch. QE is vital for keeping favoured public-private partnerships in place to keep central reforms going. Liz Truss’s meagre attempts to rein in the straining UK budget – less than a 2% cut – were notably sabotaged by the Bank of England, which sold off gilt bonds and tightened money supply, creating a threat to financial stability that saw Truss removed and the policy reversed. Truss was of course warned they would use this method, but the silly sausage thought she could win the staring contest.

Most of the time, states know not to mess with global governance. It is not a game for small players.

 
The Retard Shield

I have a strange theory here. Of course, South Africa will eventually get with the programme, I have little doubt. But it will take far longer than elsewhere, thanks in part to our tremendous corruption and incompetence, which keeps large swathes of the population in the dark.

Despite being a Cape independence advocate, I have no doubt that the Cape will likely have to acquiesce to much of this stuff, and short of a rather totalising dictatorship, which seems singularly unwise in our circumstances, it seems unlikely that we will be able to resist any of it.

But we do have a unique opportunity in the rest of South Africa – with a combination of Bitcoin and cash, it is possible to set up banking institutions which give retail banking customers limited opportunity to operate outside of these coming controls, provided one can develop enclaves outside the government’s control. A great deal of the people who lean into Bitcoin also tend to be freemarketeers, meaning they prefer the use of commercial gates communities as the mechanism for this, but this is a fools errand, since private companies are very compliant.

The real hope lies in projects like Orania – with their own low-level banking institution, they can have their own economy trading with and through the rest of South Africa, and there are mechanisms to set up similarly independent enclaves elsewhere in the country, which I have done a fair bit of research into.

In a country where the state is headed for a fiscal cliff (by professional estimates, likely sometime early in the coming decade), and where enforcement capacity is anaemic on all fronts, there lies an opportunity to use a decrepit state as a shield against global control by finding shelter in pockets of order within its borders – the international system does cannot deal with such subnational entities, and must deal with states and state-level institutions, so enforcement will be tough.

Afrikaners are of course not the only people capable of reaching for this holy grail, but they are by far the closest to achieving it. It just requires a great deal of focus and willpower. The tools are right there, we just have to reach for them.