South Africa's real economy could be decimated "within months" unless urgent action was taken to weaken the rampant rand, Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) executive and chief economist Lumkile Mondi said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the annual general meeting of the Metal and Engineering Industries Bargaining Council, held in Johannesburg, Mondi also called on the South African Reserve Bank's monetary policy committee, which was meeting on Wednesday and Thursday to deliberate on South Africa's interest rate trajectory, to cut rates by a further 50 basis points.

Mondi, along with some other economists, as well as a range of social groups, viewed another cut as necessary to help stimulate the flagging economy and to weaken a currency that had emerged as one of the world's best performing units during 2009.

Some in government had also started to express their discomfort with the stronger currency - adding their voices to those of resources and manufacturing executives, who have, for most of 2009, bemoaned the rand's impact on the relative competitiveness of their businesses.

Only last week, Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies argued that the South African currency, at its current levels, was "not conducive" to industrial development, and indicated that actions should be taken "urgently" to achieve a more stable and competitive exchange rate.

But he also stressed that government would not seek to "target" a specific level for the rand, arguing only that the current rate of better than R7,40 to the US dollar was "rendering a lot of our industry uncompetitive".

That said, the consensus view on Wednesday was that outgoing Reserve bank governor Tito Mboweni, who had a narrow inflation-targeting mandate, would keep rates unchanged before handing over the governorship of the bank to Gill Marcus in November.

But Mondi remained hopeful, saying that he hoped the governor would "leave us with a smile".

"You simply can't have a currency that is so strong if we are going to retain jobs - particularly in export-related sectors," he asserted.

Mondi, along with several other economists, recently went as far as to call on Mboweni to "aggressively buy foreign exchange" to weaken the rand.

These economist noted that local manufacturing, as measured in terms of the physical volume of production, was at its lowest level since early 2004 and that any serious effort to address poverty and unemployment would require action to deal with the "single greatest factor compounding the crisis" - the rand.

Others caution that such an intervention could not only be costly, but could have unintended consequences for inflation and the country's national balances. Opponents also point to past failures by the Reserve Bank, which at one point ineffectively intervened, in a bid to shore up the rand.

Further, in a context where much capital would have to be imported to deal with South Africa's serious, and economy-constraining, infrastructure backlogs, it was far from clear what a weaker currency might mean for the cost of the transport, water and power programmes.