Now’s the time to take off the shackles

WHETHER the orgy of looting and destruction of the past week in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng was planned that way or simply took on a life of its own due to massive youth unemployment and simple mob behaviour and common criminality, doesn’t matter. The damage has been done. Now we must rebuild.

Let the socialist academics, point-making politicians and other moralists add their pennyworths to the background noises of social media. Nothing they can say will remove the thunderous shout of common sense: only the private sector can get us out of the morass of incompetence and inefficiency that we have driven into during the last two decades.

We had a marvellous start in 1994, with a genuinely democratic Constitution, plus all the checks and balances the world experts applauded – our Bill of Rights, our independent judiciary, our legal system, our functioning modern economic sector, and so much more.

We were hailed as a rainbow nation – a lesson to the world of how multicultural, multiracial, multilingual societies could succeed, the hope of an African continent that had seen so much fail. Less than 30 years later what do we have? An almost bankrupt state. A hopelessly corrupt and inept political elite bent on a socialist experiment along lines that have failed everywhere in the world it has been attempted.

But in this dark picture that horrifies all clear-thinking South Africans, there are glimmers of light. Among the brightest of these is the way communities in the affected provinces have banded together, often across racial lines, to protect each other’s premises and neighbourhoods to stop the looting from spreading further. In places among the hardest hit, there have even been spontaneous collection and return of looted items.

Perhaps best of all there is a greater understanding of the interrelationships that bind together the provision of essential food, goods and services, and appreciation that the blocking of roads and attacking and burning of supply vehicles creates hunger, it does not solve it.

Growing wealth does not need endless additional government rules to exist. It needs fewer. We can and must make the pie bigger. And we shall, whether it takes a state of emergency to calm the waters or not, the solution to a better future is an unshackled private sector.

We need now more than ever the protection and strengthening of private property rights; a repeated demonstration of and emphasis that no one is above the law, especially corrupt politicians and civil servants.

We need to be seen to be stripping away regulatory burdens on small to medium businesses like the licensing overload. We must end labour laws that protect the few at the expense of the many willing to work even for less than the national minimum wage.

The fight between a free economy to create and spread the wealth is on one side and on the other, the forces of outdated social manipulation and traditions that, however noble they were centuries ago, now stand in the way of a growing population that must be fed and educated to compete in a highly competitive modern world which our ancestors could never have predicted.

DEAN LE GRANGE | Spokesperson of Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry