It’s a constant conundrum to me how and why the ruling party continues to shoot itself in the foot and scores own goals (choose your own idiom) by not changing rules and regulations or situations that can in most cases have an immediate and positive benefit to the economy, and country as a whole, in most instances.
Let’s start with long-stay visitors visas. I was recently in Cape Town visiting my sister and brother-in law who’s a restauranteur.
His business is overwhelmingly from foreign visitors, and foreign long-stay residents, who have purchased property in Cape Town.
The powers that be (read Department of Home Affairs) has recently reduced the term of long-stay visitors from six months to three months, which essentially means that they have to exit the country after three months, and re-enter SA thereafter.
Given the amount of money (and employment) long-term visitors, particularly homeowners inject into the economy (Harald’s restaurant being a case in point), common sense surely dictates that we should enable their stay here for as long as possible. Clearly the Home Affairs czars think otherwise.
Then there’s Eskom, who made moves recently to import diesel directly, rather than buy from ‘middlemen’.
At a conservative estimate, this would have saved Eskom around R3bn/year.
In their wisdom, the Department of Minerals and Energy (DMRE) turned down the license application, ostensibly because they did not have the ‘import infrastructure’ and storage capacity. Seriously? How long would it take the biggest SOE in the country to lease or develop these.
It is an open secret that Eskom needs every rand it can through cost savings or revenue and R3bn is not a sum to be sneezed at.
Of course, we have the R56bn owed to Eskom by municipalities and the R6bn odd by residents of Soweto, which the government appears to be in no hurry to assist Eskom recoup…go figure.
And lastly, we have Transnet, which for the last 10 years, has failed to invest in or maintain existing capacity that would have allowed miners to export billions of dollars in product.
In its last annual report, Samancor, the largest chrome and iron ore exporter reported that it had foregone R10bn in revenue on product that it could not get to ports to export.
In similar vein, the Richards Bay Coal Terminal has constantly failed to meet built capacity because of Transnet’s inability to meet miners capacity requirements.
These problems have been around for almost two ‘administrations’, and there appears to be no sense of urgency to fix them.
This is money ‘on the table’ that the economy desperately needs, foreign money at that, but no one seems to care.
Vijay Naidoo is the CEO of the Port Shepstone Business Forum. He writes in his personal capacity. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.
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