The Cabinet decided a year ago to subject all new measures to socioeconomic impact assessments. If they are serious about transformation, they should start by identifying and repealing or relaxing all measures with anti-transformation effects. They should devote their next parliamentary session to legislation by repeal.
State’s transformation ideas are really blatantly anti-transformation: Leon Louw’s latest column in BDlive published by Business Day.
Excerpts
The transformation drumbeat conceals more than it reveals. That measures are never overtly anti-black does not sanitise them. Apartheid made the average black person poorer and less qualified than the average white. To that extent, measures victimising poor and unqualified people are anti-transformation. If all businesses were white, laws prohibiting entry would be anti-black. If low-income consumers are black, forcing prices up is anti-black.
Of course, things are never that perfectly black and white. That fact, combined with slick rhetoric, disguises the anti-transformation nature of discriminatory policies. Proposed liquor policy, for instance, envisages the prohibition of liquor sales in unzoned (i.e. black) areas. The obvious effect will be promotion of white-owned businesses in “white” areas.
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Virtually every recent and proposed measure is similarly anti-transformation. The Financial Services Board boasted to Parliament that it outlawed 15,000 enterprises, most of which were black-owned and served black beneficiaries. Its “market conduct” controls will make it virtually impossible for emerging black-owned enterprises to compete with established enterprises.
The list goes on. By increasing credit-provider costs and risks, the National Credit Act diverts wealth from low-income black people. The Consumer Protection Act forces consumers to buy benefits that increase prices, which affects poor people disproportionately. Peasant farmers used to buying ploughs, pumps or “bakkies” for, say, R5,000 must now buy a prohibitively costly warranties for R50,000 or whatever.
Consumer “rights” force consumers to buy costly “protection”, such as a “cooling-off period”. The technology and staffing needed to honour such “rights” favours large sophisticated outlets at the expense of small and emerging competitors.