While Business Unity SA (Busa) welcomes the positive intention of the Department of Trade and Industry, to promote an environment conducive to business expansion and its purpose of ensuring compliance, Busa’s assessment of the draft Licensing of Business Bill 2013 is that it is yet another piece of legislation that overwhelms small businesses with its compliance and regulatory framework.
Based on consultation with its members, Busa’s view is that the current draft bill will inadvertently yield consequences that will instead retard the growth and development of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and further harm a sector which is struggling with a high business failure rate. We also find the bill to be contrary to the spirit of the National Development Plan (NDP), whose objectives are to have 90 percent of all jobs by 2030 derived from the small enterprises sector.
Areas of concern to business are:
n The compliance burden is too onerous, diverting time and resources away from the core business of companies;
n The draft bill will spur illegal businesses, which can lead to increased bribery and corruption;
n This bill will heighten the risk profile of businesses, which already have to contend with challenges of access to finance;
n The accumulation of regulatory requirements raises costs of doing business;
n The bill will impose an increased administrative burden on the authorities, who already lack capacity;
n It does not give clarity of application to businesses with a national footprint;
n The bill speaks of an automatic revocation of licence, if non-compliance is found, and a business owner can only appeal once the business has been closed. This does not provide a fair process for a business to plead its case before the licence is revoked. This appears to be an administrative injustice that goes against the provisions of section 33 of the constitution.
Busa believes the draft licensing legislation should be subjected to a regulatory impact assessment analysis.
Additionally, we need to increasingly align economic and business policies with the spirit of the NDP and objectives of the State of the Nation address and deliberately nurture SMEs, instead of creating more overwhelming paperwork.
Nomaxabiso Majokweni
chief executive, Business Unity SA
Customs duties on chicken will hit poor
Your readers are likely aware of the recent application to raise customs duties on imported chicken to levels of up to 82 percent.
The result of the success of such an action will be to increase chicken prices at the tills by between 30 percent and 50 percent. With chicken being a large part of the daily diet of the majority of South Africa’s poor, this rise will devastate their lives, and force them to seek dietary substitutes.
Imports are already generally more expensive than local equivalents, but are often preferred by consumers because of the high brining levels of most local chicken, often exceeding 40 percent of the mass of the meat in the pack.
Protecting an industry that is suffering the normal consequences of economic decline, as well as its own business frailties, to the detriment of long-suffering consumers, will not only create anger in the streets, but will inevitably lead to net job losses in the wider economy while contributing to the growing problem of potentially rampant food inflation.
David Wolpert
chief executive, Association of Meat Importers and Exporters of SA, Rivonia, johannesburg.
Transformation is compatible with merit
A crucial debate is raging within the legal community in South Africa. How should the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) balance judicial transformation and merit in the appointment of judicial officers? Is it a matter of simply excluding white men and appointing black men at all costs?
With the recent JSC appointments, women have become the demographic losers and hence the appointment of judicial officers, in addition to the transformation against merit debate, has now also become a black men against white men issue.
As the debate rages on, there is palpable anger from both sides. I believe the framing of the issue as a transformation against merit debate misses the point.
Well-framed issues allow the potential for multiple views to be considered, poorly framed issues allow for limited views. For example, the transformation versus merit framing presents the positional statement that it is either transformation or merit. Such a framing leads to the conclusion that transformation is incompatible with merit.
As a black executive who is passionate about transformation in corporate South Africa, I strongly believe that merit and transformation are compatible concepts. In fact, the crucial debate must be on unpacking a value-laden concept like merit. This is important because values vary so widely among the stakeholders with a vested interest in judicial transformation.
The debate reminded me of these wise words from former US president Lyndon Johnson: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say: you are free to compete with the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
Watching the recent JSC interviews in Soweto for a Constitutional Court judge, I missed leadership from the JSC that allows for a deeper engagement on the transformation of the judiciary with transformation and merit as compatible concepts.
Frank Magwegwe
Head: Middle Market Segment Retail