FREE BUSINESS FROM STATE’S SHACKLES
It is hardly necessary for the FM to remind voters that election pledges and post-electoral reality tend to inhabit parallel worlds. But it is disturbing that, even as President Cyril Ramaphosa spent his last weekend of campaigning by promising to remove barriers to investment and end policy uncertainty, his head of economic transformation, Enoch Godongwana, and his tourism minister, Derek Hanekom, were effectively doing the opposite.
In an interview with Carte Blanche, Godongwana indicated that South Africans’ pension savings may be redirected to fund the coal mines that money-guzzling Eskom desperately needs since banks like Nedbank and Standard Bank are pulling away from financing coal projects.
And, in yet another bafflingly counterproductive legislative push, the tourism ministry under Hanekom has tabled a raft of suggestions, some of them overwhelmingly obnoxious, to regulate the mushrooming Airbnb sector. These proposals could end up hobbling a fantastically successful, nascent market that has enabled SA to tap a wellspring of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency.
At Sunday’s rally, Ramaphosa specifically picked out small business and tourism as a route to grow the economy. “It is,” he said, “through greater financial support for small business that we will build a nation of entrepreneurs and innovators. It is by investing in tourism … that we will create a truly diverse economy that can compete in a challenging global environment.
“These are not just words,” he added.
Yet that is exactly what they will remain until the ANC begins not only to speak with one voice, but to prise itself loose from the ideology that the state should be at the centre of all things economic.
If Nedbank and Standard Bank no longer wish
to invest in coal that is their prerogative.
Other lenders will swoop into the gap; the market will assert itself. If one Airbnb location is favoured above others, it is testament to that locale’s excellence.
It should not be up to the state to determine where travellers should stay, in the misguided notion that it gets to dole out a “fair” share.
If you speak to entrepreneurs on the ground, the dissonance between words and actions is becoming intolerable.
Take for example a Facebook post this weekend from Cemair owner Miles van der Molen. The privately owned Cemair, which competes against SAA and SA Airlink, has had its entire fleet of aircraft grounded since December in what appears to be a campaign by the Civil Aviation Authority to keep the company from operating.
Last week, Cemair won an appeal against the grounding of its fleet and the subsequent cancellation of its operating certificates.
Van der Molen, who prefaces his post as advice for those looking to run their own businesses, says: “I need to share some insights with aspirational business owners in SA, to the enthusiastic entrepreneur who sees opportunity and possibility. Advice for the people who are the lifeblood of a growing and vibrant economy, and it can be summarised in one line: start with an emigration form. Find a country that works and go and do it there.”
It’s an alarming, if reactionary, view. But it speaks volumes that entrepreneurs, who pay tax and create livelihoods for others, are so discouraged that no election promise will halt their departure. An honest and self-searching appraisal by SA’S new leaders, beyond platitudes, of the challenges facing business owners may go some way to achieving Ramaphosa’s vision of renewal, growth, unity and prosperity.
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