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Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. Photo: Simphiwe Mbokazi

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan was aware that there were funding problems facing small business and was engaging with funding institutions to find out where the blockages were, he said in Soweto on Thursday night.

“We are not doing well on small business funding as far as I am concerned,” he told a meeting that had been organised by the Greater Soweto Business Forum at the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg.

Gordhan said the government had gone a long way to make it easier for small businesses to pay tax and this was paying off.

He said he had been confronted by officials from India and Malaysia recently who pointed out that South Africa was lacking in small business development.

“How do we have more and more entrepreneurs? We need to move away from the mindset that says government will do everything for us. The dialogue must go on as to what we do for small business in the next 10 years. There are many changes that we need to do. We have to move to 7 percent growth for the next 20 years in order to grow small business,” Gordhan said.

He was speaking in Soweto as part of what appears to be a concerted effort by the government to have its presence felt in the biggest township in the country. SA Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus is due to speak on the same campus on March 29. She spoke at the same venue in September.

And Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Elizabeth Thabethe was in Tshiawelo – a part of Soweto – on Tuesday, where she addressed 500 small business owners under the auspices of the Greater Soweto Business Forum.

Gordhan said the Budget should be understood to be a contract between politicians, public servants and the citizens of South Africa.

But he warned that the country would still have to borrow on top of the R70 billion that was allocated for this year in the Budget.

“And we will have to pay interest on what we borrow. We don’t want to pass the debt legacy to the next generation,” he said, giving Greece as an example that borrowed far more than the repayments it could afford.

He said South Africans needed the same energy to create jobs as they had during the World Cup last year. “What the National Growth Path is saying is here are a new set of possibilities and we need to move. Lessons from other countries are that there are no textbooks on how to achieve a 7 percent growth,” Gordhan said. - Business Report