Events to promote inward investment are being held thick and fast at a provincial, district and local government level. The different spheres of government are pulling out all the stops to showcase the apparent attributes of their localities, the buzzwords being ‘comparative’ and ‘competitive advantage’.
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Almost without exception, there is a huge emphasis on attracting new investment from outside the locality, especially internationally.
Confidence
There appears to be little effort to encourage locally-based enterprises to invest in and expand their existing operations. It is as though the impediments to local investment will magically disappear when outside investors consider expanding into their areas.
The reality is that local business has lost confidence in the ability of municipal government (both district and local) to provide a level of administration and service delivery that supports the commitment to new investment.
Headache
In my recent experience, most local enterprises are opting to rent or lease new buildings rather than build their own. They would rather leave the headache of property management to their landlords than have to deal with the nightmare of delays in plan approvals, provision of bulk services or the dysfunctional billing systems.
With improved efficiency in basic administration such as plan approvals, licensing and billing, an environment conducive to new investment will be created.
Further, the cost of new development has escalated dramatically by the need in most cases to self-fund supporting infrastructure such as access roads, traffic lights etc.
Functionality
Provincial governments need to make their prime focus the restoration of the functionality of local government. With consistent and affordable basic service delivery, confidence will begin to be rebuilt among residents and local business.
Without these interventions, investment conferences will be nothing but talk shops, with a free lunch.
After matriculating, Vijay Naidoo studied Economics in the UK. Upon his return, he joined the family construction business as MD for 10 years.
He subsequently joined his sister in their furniture manufacturing business as director for quality assurance and operations. He was responsible for all quality aspects of their products, and led the project to the business achieving an ISO 9000 quality accreditation. As an export focused business, this was important for our international competitiveness.
Mr Naidoo has an abiding interest in quality management and productivity improvement, particularly in manufacturing.
More recently, he has focused a lot of his time on giving back to the community by way of mentorship of small businesses and sitting on the executive of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce. He also sits on the Board of the Ugu South Coast Development Agency.
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