• Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has called for Gauteng to reduce its use of cash money and instead embrace card and digital channels as the only means of transaction.
• Continued violent crime and cash robberies rock Gauteng, including the recent bombing of yet another CIT van.
• Not many other countries worldwide have adopted cashless economies.

In response to the recent spate of cash-in-transit robberies that have rocked Gauteng over the weekend, the province’s premier Panyaza Lesufi has called for residents, banks and retail businesses to go cashless in order to reduce violent theft of this nature.

This would entail the migration to only digital payment systems and the refusal of places of business to accept cash payments, instead, they would only accept digital and card.

“If you’ve got less cash, there won’t be ATM bombings – if you have less cash you are not going to have this cash in transit bombings – if you have less cash you’re not going to have business robberies,” said Lesufi in a televised interview with eNCA.

On Saturday, the police launched a manhunt after robbers attacked and detonated a Fidelity cash-in-transit van on the N12, South of Johannesburg, absconding with an undisclosed sum of stolen money.

“The retail industry must heed our call to move towards cashless. The hospitality industry especially hotels are cooperating nicely with us. We are a highly digital province,” Lesufi indicated in a post on X.

Several different studies have asserted that Gauteng is indeed a highly digital province, with Gauteng residents having the most access to the internet in the country at 74.6 percent, according to one piece of research from Moonstone (2019).

In 2020, a government survey found that the Western Cape was the leader in households with internet access, closely followed by Gauteng. The province also generally has the fastest internet in the country, according to an ICASA study from 2022.

Adoption of digital payment systems and fintech are at an all-time high across the country too, with companies like Yoco selling easy-to-use card machines, and corporations like MTN onboarding more and more South Africans to technologies like its MoMo platform, where amounts of money can be sent cellphone to cellphone.

Despite this, there is a concern that some people will be essentially left out of the economy if Gauteng, South Africa’s economic centre, ditches cash.

Scandinavian countries lead the world in cashless economies. Violent crime in the early 2000s also caused Sweden to slowly abandon a cash economy, especially following the movie-worthy Västberga robbery, which saw criminals hijack a helicopter to rob around $6.7 million from a bank in 2009.

Most residents of Stockholm now only use their bank cards to make payments, and apps like Swish to transfer funds to friends, and families and for business arrangements. However, elderly residents continue to battle against the new system, as well as private security companies that operate cash-in-transit vans and protect ATMs.

The Central Bank of Sweden, the Riksbank describes how efficient and secure digital payments, and the abundance of fintech solutions continue to move people away from cash towards going completely cashless.

South Africa enjoys both safe and efficient digital payment technologies and fintech, some of which can be accessed through banks. The innovation of the Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), which has long been a staple in South African finance are only now becoming of interest for countries like the US.

South Africa, and Gauteng are in a position where a cashless economy is not unrealistic to achieve, but it would take a mass concerted effort from citizens, government entities, banks and retailers. In Sweden, the transition to a cashless economy happened naturally.

In South Africa, the informal economy still relies heavily on the movement of cash, and the population of unbanked individuals remains high who only have access to cash to make their payments. Lesufi’s call to move to a cashless society may well be a suggestion more than an actual call to arms against cash.

If the suggestion does however move towards policy, it will join a series of other tech-minded initiatives started by the premier, including recruiting youths to become solar power technicians and launching a host of drones to police Johannesburg’s streets. Some of these projects see better outcomes than others.

[Image – Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash]