Letter: Four steps to get SA moving - Businesslive

You write in your editorial that “the government should stop dilly-dallying and take the tough decisions to get SA moving” (“Fed rate cut puts focus on Bank, but long-term solution lies with government”, March 4). But you do not spell out what your newspaper thinks those should be.

At the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), the view is that four necessary reforms must be introduced. The first is a complete repeal of all race-based equity and empowerment policies. These should be replaced with the new socioeconomically based empowerment policy developed by my colleagues, called economic empowerment for the disadvantaged (EED).

The second is stopping all moves towards expropriation without compensation, and the third repealing much of SA’s labour legislation, including that which provides for the horizontal application of bargaining council agreements and minimum wage regulations, allowing instead for a system of private voluntary contract between employer and employee. The purpose is to price poor people into their first jobs so that they might gain the skills and experience denied to them in SA’s failing education system.

And the fourth is to greatly increase the authority parents and communities exert over schools through the introduction of a voucher or contract schooling model.

These four reforms would be a good start to get SA moving and, if introduced, would open the way to further reforms.

Austerity and cutting expenditure and wage levels do not feature much in our thinking, save where such cuts address wasteful expenditure. Austerity is no solution to a low-growth problem born of bad policy.

We find it amazing that the government presses ahead with its expropriation ideals, and is willing as a consequence to go as far as proposing subinflationary social grant increases and cutting its civil service expenditure.

Frans Cronjé
Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2020-03-04-letter-four-steps-to-get-sa-moving/