South Africa is no stranger to state-owned enterprises hitting the wall. Eskom’s load-shedding, Transnet’s rail and port chaos, and SAA’s serial bailouts have cost the fiscus dearly – driving the economy to the brink, starving essential services and fuelling public despair.
It is almost as if the investment market, which underpins your pension, has strolled into a nightmare, and nobody in any fiduciary position seems to know how to wake up.
It’s no longer just inept municipal councillors in the firing line for deducting pension contributions from staff salaries and failing to pay them over to the fund; now, company directors are in the dock too.
Either way, finance minister Enoch Godongwana’s budget speech last week would have been a historic moment in South Africa’s history.
Hidden away on page 166 of the budget review, deep in “Annexure E”, is another potential bombshell for the two-pot retirement fund system.
The buck stops with pension fund trustees when pension contributions vanish.
The two-pot retirement system is humming along. But trustees face new challenges, in adapting their investment strategies to balance immediate cash demands against long-term returns
Yusuf Wadee, head of Exchange-Traded Products at Satrix, shares insights on fee trends and how index-tracking investment product providers balance cost-effectiveness and returns in this high-fee landscape
South African pension funds must invest more in infrastructure projects, to contribute to the nation’s development, or risk prescribed assets, a panel at Batseta’s 10th Winter Conference heard
