Busa: It’s not just Mining Charter, it’s fishing, emissions, land, NHI, water …
● It is not only the unresolved Mining Charter that gives business and investors sleepless nights over policy uncertainty. Tanya Cohen, CEO of Business Unity South Africa, this week highlighted several other issues.
She said the government’s efforts to deal with climate change and related issues were not properly co-ordinated and in some cases placed onerous financial burdens on businesses.
For example, the draft policy on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions for the 2021–2035 period was not aligned with the Carbon Tax Bill, Cohen said.
Other legislation that impacted on business included the Climate Change Bill and the recently published Air Quality Act.
Cohen said legislation on competition was under review and needed to be monitored closely to ensure that it did not inadvertently deter investment.
On land reform, Cohen said Busa was “mindful of the considerable challenges facing the country pertaining to land reform”.
Her organisation had been engaging with social partners in the National Economic Development and Labour Council on several legal instruments since 2015.
These were in various stages of consideration and implementation, and included regulations on land holdings, deeds registration, communal land and labour rights.
“Uncertainty as to the content and timing of this legislation, in addition to the relationship between various legal instruments, together with the parliamentary processes, do not create the stable foundation required for investment in the [agrarian] sector,” Cohen said. She added the constitutional review committee’s consideration of the property clause had resulted in concern over whether rights to property — movable, immovable and intellectual — were still secure.
In healthcare also, the various initiatives were not adequately aligned with each other, Cohen said.
While Nedlac members were negotiating a comprehensive social security framework, separate processes were being pursued on national health and other overlapping matters, she said.
These issues, too, involved financial and implementation challenges.
Cohen said delays of up to five years in approvals for water-use licences could “devastate agrarian land reform”.
The licence system was ridden with inefficiencies and placed onerous conditions on applicants, most of which she said could not be complied with.
Licensing in the fishing industry was restricting operations. For example, about 95 licences had been issued out of about 700 applicants in an industry largely composed of small-scale black emerging crayfish businesses.
The immigration system remained hostile to business, with delays in processing corporate visas, Cohen said.
This impacted on potential investors, and there were also tourist industry challenges because of tourist visa issues.
Cohen said the extensive legislation “regardless of how necessary or appropriate it is, creates a compliance burden that is a challenge, particularly for smaller and startup businesses”.
She said that within the skills development and labour law regime there was also a host of legislation, supplemented by codes, guidelines and regulations, that made it impossible for business to comply with.
“Unfortunately, the list [of problem areas] could be far longer.
“We could raise concerns pertaining to a host of other areas, which are similarly unable to rely on the regulatory framework as a basis for business decision-making,” Cohen said.
Returning to the Mining Charter, Henk Langenhoven, chief economist at the Minerals Council South Africa (formerly the Chamber of Mines), said that in the form it had been published it would “stop new projects dead”.
He noted that the draft Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act also remained in limbo.