Too much interference by the ANC government along with unfavourable policies leave South Africa’s economy with no room to grow.
The FF Plus proposes the following to stimulate economic growth:
1. The Department of Trade and Industry and the Commission for Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) must do a socio-economic impact study to determine the impact that BEE has on the country’s economy on the whole, and in particular, the impact that it has on the people that are negatively affected by BEE.
2. The National Lotteries Commission (NLC) must ensure that its mandate always includes a focus on social development in all its forms, including the protection of animals. It may not happen again that animal welfare organisations do not get any funding. The chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee for Trade and Industry, Ms Joanmariae Fubbs, has undertaken to pay attention to the matter in response to the FF Plus’s request.
3. The Department must speed up the process of creating more Special Economic Zones (SEZ’s) so as to facilitate investment and job creation. In particular, the focus must be on creating SEZ’s without Affirmative Action (AA) and BEE. It can serve as an experiment to see what the effect of a free market will be on economic growth.
4. The Department must also ensure that the National Metrological Institute of South Africa (NMISA), the South African National Accreditation System (SANAS) and associated institutions like the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications (NRCS) and the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) are improved to ensure that technical instruments are up to standard. Standards must be set and complied with to ensure that the import, production and utilisation of instruments and products without compliance does not occur and that the instruments and products are safe to use. An example of this is the e-toll system’s instruments that were imported and utilised without a standard production and certification process.
5. The Department must make sure that the newly proposed film production incentive meets the needs of the domestic and international audio-visual production industry to guarantee more investments and the growth of the local film, television and general audio-visual production industry.
6. The Department must make sure that the Industrial Policy Action Plan takes note of the nature and impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the future and the Department must also ensure that plans to minimise its negative effects are in place so as to stimulate economic growth.
7. The Minister and the Department must ensure policy certainty with regard to expropriation without compensation and must also ensure that it will not in any way be detrimental to economic development and job creation as well as to existing property owners and title holders of all kinds of property.
Expropriation without compensation also affects foreign investors. As existing bilateral agreements lapse, the stipulations in the Protection of Investment Act will replace them. What is disturbing is that section 10 of this act stipulates that international investors have the right to property in terms of section 25 of the Constitution; and it is precisely this constitutional section that must be amended to make expropriation without compensation possible.
It means that despite all the assurance given by the Minister and the Department during the drafting of the Protection of Investment Act that investor relations will not be negatively affected, direct foreign investment will ultimately be destroyed by expropriation without compensation.
The FF Plus is calling on the government to consider this and to pay attention to the party’s suggestions to make sure that the economy does grow to the benefit of everyone.
Contact numbers: 082 391 3117 / 065 801 7216
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