Leon Louw equates SA’s small-business policy to a ‘mother feeding a baby with one hand and throttling it with the other’ with the Cabinet and most government departments and agencies contributing to a relentless tsunami of anti-small-business measures.

He suggests the small business ministry should :

  • Foster the discontinuance of harm.
  • Waste no time getting timely payments.
  • Waste no time bullying anyone into preferring small businesses.
  • Encourage the unbundling of tenders.
  • Promote regulatory impact assessments on proposed and existing laws.
  • Reactivate the Temporary Removal of Restrictions on Economic Activities Act 87 of 1986.
  • Get labour laws relaxed.

Leon Louw, the executive director of the Free Market Foundation, writes a column for Business Day and his latest column Preference for small business not productive appeared for the first time on BDLive on 10 September 2014.

Extracts

Meaningless promises of red-tape reduction have been made repeatedly by President Jacob Zuma and the worst-offending ministries: finance, trade and industry, labour, health, and development.   Although Zulu has joined the chorus, it is too soon to say if her promises will also amount to naught.   Her counterparts neither notice nor care about the contradiction between meaningless promises and the reality of regulatory diarrhoea that gushes from every government orifice.   Most measures over the past decade have been mercilessly anti-small business.

Doomed are her proposals to get other departments to pay on time and to pay more for small-business procurement.   The former is a fantasy; one department cannot get others to function properly.   The latter rewards private-sector inefficiency.   Every cent spent on procurement at a premium from A in excess of what B would charge enriches the rich at the expense of the poor.   That Zulu wants “big money for small business” is bad news; that she wants to “cut red tape” is good news.

Big businesses have resources and influence not only to cope with interventionism, but to bias it in their favour.   That is why they often promote or welcome interventionism, the most recent example being Sanlam welcoming intensified anti-small-business financial market controls emanating from the megalomaniacal Financial Services Board.

. . .

“We have no doubt,” said Zulu, “that much-needed economic growth and employment opportunities will come from a radical policy that enables small businesses to thrive and grow into profitable enterprises.”    She is right, except that small business “support” is not “radical”, whereas liberalisation is.