Big shoes to fill
Cees Bruggemans (60) has retired after nearly 28 years as the chief economist of First National Bank (FNB), but will continue to write the Comment and Rex articles he posts nearly daily on the FNB Economics website.
Surely SA’s most original and prolific economic commentator, Bruggemans joined FNB (or Barclays National as it was then known) in 1985 as “a Dutch immigrant speaking pidgin English and a funny-accented kind of Afrikaans”.
His economic commentary reflected his linguistic idiosyncrasies and was often as colourful and cryptic as it was elegant and entertaining, but all with the purpose of guiding the reader to think more deeply and clearly about current events.
“Cees is a truly original thinker,” says Rand Merchant Bank’s former chief economist Rudolf Gouws. “He has angles on issues most would never have thought of, and illustrates them in a most distinctive way, using examples from (for most others, long-forgotten) history, as well as from many other fields beyond straight economics — even the movies!”
Describing Bruggemans as “an institution”, Nedbank chief economist Dennis Dykes notes that Bruggemans’ three decades at the bank covered the Rubicon speech, the debt standstill, the RDP, Gear, Asgisa, the National Development Plan, half a dozen rand crises, the Asian crisis in 1998, the dotcom bubble popping, 9/11 and the great financial crisis.
Bruggemans agrees that his period of office coincided with tumultuous times: “When I joined Barclays National as chief economist on May 1 1985, it was by far the biggest bank in SA, something it has again achieved only this month when going by FirstRand’s rapidly rising market capitalisation.
“In between, the bank went all over the place, as did SA and the world at large. Yet the Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’ is for economists a blessing in disguise, as tranquillity can be pretty boring, like watching paint dry and grass grow.”
Bruggemans, who is only the second chief economist in the bank’s history, is looking forward to his retirement with “great relish”, but will continue to play a consulting role at the bank. He is to be succeeded by Sizwe Nxedlana, a senior economist at FNB Wealth and a member of the bank’s investment and asset allocation committees.
“Cees is a highly respected economist and has made a significant contribution to the success of FNB’s economics service,” Nxedlana said in a statement.
“These are big shoes to fill but I am looking forward to the challenge.”