SA cabinet approves new coin designs
JOHANNESBURG. – South Africa’s cabinet has approved a new design for coins that will feature inscriptions in all official languages.
The official languages will be rotated annually over the next 10 years.
This is the fourth time South Africa will be changing the design of its coins – the last one being in 1989.
The cabinet in a statement explained how the new design will look like for each denomination.
“The word ‘South Africa’ will be inserted on the one side of the coins and printed in all the official languages. Three languages will be used in the R5 coin; two languages R2; 50c, 20c and 10c coins and the R1 will be in one language,” the cabinet statement read in part.
The new coins will begin circulating from next year and no sample design has been generated yet.
Though the statement did not go into details, it said the language changes were part of the soon-to-be-introduced Fourth Decimal Coin Series.
The changes are significant, as it will only be the fourth time since the SA Mint started pressing its own coins in 1961 that it introduces a new series of coins. The country is currently using the Third Decimal Coin Series, which was introduced in 1989.
Though the cabinet approved the “dimension, design, and compilation” of the coins, images of the new coins were not released.
The last most significant change occurred in 1989 and included the removal of Jan van Riebeek, a Dutch colonial administrator, from one side of the ½c, 1c, 2c, 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c and R1 coins. His image was replaced with the South Africa’s coat of arms.
Since then, the ½c, 1c, 2c, 5c, have been removed from circulation and the R2 and R5 coins were added.
South Africa has 11 official languages: Zulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Setswana, English, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenda and Ndebele. – BusinessInsider
