DE JA VU

Very predictable speech, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Myriad of bottlenecks, corruption, red-tape and political instability, regulatory discrepancy that hamper our economy in a larger scale, while complex and lengthy inefficient border administrations, challenging Africa’s commercial landscape, charecterised by patchwork of tared rules and regulations which make cross-border trade cumbersome, and sometimes impossible to function.

Unemployment continue to escalate, and corruption continue to cripple our economic growth. We all anticipate with optimism for the Finance Minister, Mr Tito Titus Mboweni to outline effective and proper strategy to expedite foreign direct investments in order to improve our economy. He must impose sin tax on products that continue to destroy our community, and cut on wage expenditure in public sector wage, equitable share on provinces. Informal trading has risen partly as a “rational response to the costs and red tape involved in exporting products through formal economy” defying government’s tariff revenues an often triggering bribery and corruption. Our country is the largest intra-regional trader, exporting more than billions worth of goods and importing less of billions worth of goods from the rest of the Continent and the world. South Africans must consume locally produced goods, if they want to bolster our ailing economy, and there will be no con-commitant growth if in economy without improvement in infrastructure, and strong policies to realign administration of municipalities and state-owned enterprises. Government must re-hatch new plans to improve small and medium enterprises. Money must be put aside to improve soft-skills in order to enhance enterpreneural growth and youth employment through social compact and labour framework. Load-shedding and SOE’s bail out are crippling our developing economy. Growth projections be anything to 0% will be credible. @makalelasamson.