‘Ministry of small business destruction’
HELEN Zille, the DA federal council chairperson, loves and wants to continue living in South Africa.
It’s a country with huge potential, she told POST ahead of the unveiling of the party’s new offices in Island Circle in Riverhorse Valley, Durban, on Thursday. But the 70-year-old former mayor of Cape Town said there was just one problem – South Africa has a terrible government.
“It’s certainly not a place where most people want to invest,” said Zille.
She said investment would not happen until South Africa had policy certainty and a policy environment that attracted investment. And until that was attained, there would not be sustainable economic growth nor muchneeded jobs.
“The ANC cannot provide that policy environment because it’s at war around policy, amongt other things. So as long as the ANC is in power, we will not be able to attract investment at the rate we need to create jobs. That’s just a fact.
“I obviously want to live in South Africa because I believe it’s a fantastic country with huge potential and a terrible government. And so, I have spent my whole adult life working to get the political framework right so that the economy can flourish.”
Zille said unemployment remained the main challenge, and that a paralysed government that was at war with itself would never be able to attract investment and enable the economy to grow and create jobs.
“Governments think that if they create all kinds of positions in ministries and stuff, they are dealing with unemployment. They are not. They are not at all.”
She said the government needed to make sure people invested and started businesses.
“So let’s say every small business employs on average five people. You want a million or 2 million small businesses to open so that you can have 5 million or 10 million jobs. Then you have to see what are the barriers to investment. Why aren’t people starting businesses?”
She said a lot of capital was going offshore – and to other places – because people don’t have confidence in the future of South Africa.
“So what would the DA do? We would have policies in place that would create confidence in the future. We would have policy certainty. We would make it easier in terms of policy for a business to create a job, to get a job, and to keep a job. And that only comes through policy certainty.
“For example, you can’t have stuff like expropriation without compensation. No one is going to invest in an environment where there is expropriation of your assets without compensation or even the risk of that. Nobody is going to invest when there are so many regulations about who you may employ, how you may employ them, what you may do.
“I just read an article now about how the Minister of Small Business Development is running around when we’ve got far too few small businesses, now she’s running around closing small businesses because of all their crazy regulations.
“So they are the ministry of small business destruction. The DA would make it much easier to start a small business, to register a small business, and to run a small business, with the goal of creating at least a million new small businesses to create the jobs we need to create.
“And you have to get the regulatory environment right. The government has to stop passing laws that make it impossible for businesses to run. We would also deal with all the things that make it impossible for businesses to function.”
She said Eskom was the biggest inhibitor of investment in South Africa.
“Because no business is going to invest where there is no electricity or where the electricity supply keeps getting disrupted. When the electricity supply is disrupted, you cannot run your business and you make a loss. So if you have reliable energy, I will invest in your country.
“We have to get rid of the Eskom monopoly. This will allow many, many players to come into the energy generation space to bring down the cost of energy, to break Eskom’s monopoly and to make sure there is energy security so people invest.
“The same thing with basic services. No one is going to invest if they can’t flush a toilet, or there isn’t clean water. So it’s all these (issues) that the DA gets right where it governs, which makes it easier for businesses to start.”
Could this perhaps be why some people prefer settling in Cape Town?
“It’s because we put the right people in the right positions. We aren’t corrupt and we fulfil our constitutional mandate. It’s very simple.”
With the national elections in 2024, Zille said they wanted to show people that where the DA governed, life would get better.
“I think there is a general understanding in the Western Cape, where we govern, that things are a lot better than anywhere else in the country. We want people to vote for a government because it means a better life.”
Last July, parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng saw violence erupt during the unrest. Businesses were broken into, looted and burnt. Lives were lost. Some of the alleged killers were arrested and are before the courts. The instigators are unknown. The unrest also resulted in divisions between the black and Indian communities north of Durban.
While the government was chastised for reacting too late, Cape Town remained unaffected by violence.
Zille believes the unrest was orchestrated and that it was directly linked with the internal conflicts in the ANC.
“It was the internal battle for control in the ANC spilling very violently into the public domain and causing untold damage and destruction both in the short term and in the long term to our economy. That’s been the DA’s view on this.
“We were the first party on the ground and we were with the people immediately after that and throughout that process. We believe that it is totally untenable for the conflict inside the ANC to cause such disruptions for all South Africans.”
She said not enough had been done to ensure this would not happen again – because the ANC was at war.
“And that war is going to continue this year because there is an elective conference coming up at the end of the year. The new dawn forces and the RET (radical economic transformation) forces are in an internal war and that will spill out in all kinds of ways across South Africa, not least of all in government paralysis.
“And government paralysis is the least of the problems. It’s terrible when the government cannot do anything because the ANC is at war but it’s obviously far worse when you have the eruption of violence and looting and killing that we had last July, and so the ANC’s problems become South Africa’s problems and that is going to continue for a long time – until the ANC is voted out of power.”
While the DA plots out its campaign ahead of 2024, a number of black leaders have left the party – for varying reasons. They include Phumzile van Damme, Mmusi Maimane, Herman Mashaba and Lindiwe Mazibuko.
But Zille does not see their departure, or anyone else’s departure, as a problem.
“Well, we have a large number of black leaders coming through the ranks. People must be free to come and go as they like. Lots of leaders leave the ANC. Lots of leaders leave other parties ... There are many black people coming through the ranks.
“You’ve seen Mpho Phalatse, our mayor of Johannesburg; Randal Williams, our mayor of Pretoria or Tshwane ... Refiloe Nt’sekhe would have been mayor of Ekurhuleni but she decided not to take up the position. Nqaba Bhanga would have been mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay. There are many, many black leaders."
Zille, herself, does not know where she sees herself – even five years from now.
“Who knows. I don’t make five-year plans. I just do the best that I can in every job that I am in and I will see where life takes me.”