All Things ConsideredNow there's a problem with R100 notes |
Peter Sullivan reckons we might need to ask the cleverest person in the land to help.
JOHANNESBURG - South Africa's Mint is having some trouble. We all know about R200 note problems, now it appears there are problems with the R100 note.
Details are thin, but an employee hinted that his dismissal appeal should not be in camera as the Mint requested, because, his attorney said, the Mint merely wanted to stop the public hearing about problems with the security of the R100 note which his client had highlighted.
If your country's Mint is in trouble, you need to call in somebody really clever to sort it out, or the currency could be in serious trouble very quickly.
In England, when the Mint turned ugly, they called in not only the cleverest person in England, not only the cleverest person in Britain or Europe, not only the cleverest person in the world, but possibly the cleverest person that ever lived.
Now the Moneyweb community are themselves not stupid, and of course determining the cleverest man who ever lived (or woman) is pretty subjective stuff.
Who is the cleverest South African? Currently? That ever lived? Would be good to get some thoughts on this.
It is easy to say who is not the cleverest, but that's really not very clever at all, so let's not have responses listing who would not make the clever list. Yes, I know the non-clever list would be headed by my name.
It is far more difficult to make some real selection of the cleverest.
Back to the Royal Mint. They called in Sir Isaac Newton.
You may recall Alexander Pope's famous couplet:
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
After getting a little bored with being the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for decades, Sir Isaac went to London in 1696 to become Warden of the Royal Mint.
Here's a guy who watched an apple fall and then began a complete theory of gravity, calculated the laws of motion, worked out how and why the moon went around the Earth, calculated that the force of gravity keeping us down was 300 times the centrifugal force throwing us off the planet -- and did much of it by the time he was 23.
In a lively book "Newton and the Counterfeiter" by Thomas Levenson, the author says in the late 1680s England's money was "evaporating" because of clippers and coiners, and because the King was fighting too many wars.
"Clippers" used to cut a bit from old and worn coins, melt the silver bits together and hey presto! A new coin!
"Coiners" were the counterfeiters of the time, creating metal dies to make counterfeit coins with no silver in them.
Added to these problems was the fact that if you took a gold coin to France, the gold in it was worth more than the coin, so English gold was being exported to France at a rapid rate with no recourse for the crown.
Newton did a whole bunch of things, among them had the government recall all England's coins, melt them down, then produce brand new coinage with a milled edge so you could see if somebody had clipped it.
Levenson writes: "To most people in the 1690s, paper money was an oxymoron, as ridiculous and self contradictory as a wise fool or a cowardly lion."
But by 1694 King William was desperate so the Bank of England printed promissory notes, first for financiers, then they proved so popular that they became common exchange, and then they were finally printed on indented marbled paper as common currency.
These notes were the first real paper money, and were an instant hit - specially with a devilishly clever counterfeiter called Chaloner.
If you want to read the whole story of Newton's attempt to catch this man, buy the book.
A truly wicked man, William Chaloner was in and out of jail for coining (the crime carried the death sentence) yet managed to get himself appointed to look into the crime by the King and suggest solutions, ending up at Parliament, of all places.
Now I would never suggest there may be similarities in South Africa.
Moneyweb's community of readers know that our lawmakers are all virtuous and above suspicion. Lazy perhaps, a little loose with travel vouchers certainly, possibly overly friendly to relatives when it comes to tenders, but never corrupt. Only the despicable Press would dare to make such outrageous suggestions.
Yet some serious counterfeiting is going on in this country. Technically we have the best mint in Africa and one of the best sets of equipment in the world.
Who will save our currency?
We need to find the cleverest person in the land.
Any suggestions on who that might be?
*Peter Sullivan edited The Star in the turbulent 1990s, was group editor-in-chief of Independent Newspapers in the past decade, and spends leisure time being chairman of BirdLife South Africa. Well connected in business, politics and philanthropy, he has moderated at Davos for a dozen years.
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