A message from the Chamber President

Dear Colleagues

“Keep calm and carry on.”

The quote above attributed to Winston Churchill, is perhaps what we are compelled to do to ensure we can ‘carry on’. The continued pressure that business is under – the majority being man-made - has led to the apt response of South African private enterprise being “enough already!” As the organisation that has represented business for 218 years, we are hard at work to make sure that as a business community we are the essential ingredient to leveraging Ubuntu to create an environment in which we can safely dedicate ourselves to a working world that we would be proud to pass onto the next generation.

To those organisations that have suffered the brunt of the recent looting, we cannot imagine the frustration of seeing your hard work literally go up in smoke. Although we are removed from the unlawful looting and destruction, we were buoyed to see that it ignited a positive patriotic spirit that had been lying dormant for some time. It is our intention to support this ethos to rebuild an economy that serves as a platform for business. This perspective might be a healthy one for our future, but it is disconcerting to have experienced the litany of ‘one thing after another’ resulting in the most tortuous situation for individuals: unemployment. Gainful employment for the people of this country will be the barometer of whether we succeed. What we are seeing is true community spirit, not the manufactured solidarity of the political mob or the common objective of looters. This, plus the entrepreneurial spirit for which all South Africans are known the world over, is what we need to harness for the task of recovery that we face. We cannot afford the negative view.

There is no mystery as to how it can be done. The solution does not rest in the ivory towers where utopian theories rule over common sense. It rests in unleashing the human mind, giving it the liberty to make and sell things, to trade and construct, to make a future for its owner and its offspring, secure in the knowledge that an honest day’s work will not be taxed to feed a gargantuan unproductive bureaucracy - or be stolen by criminals.

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. Since when was no hope better than some hope?

We must end threats of expropriation of private property without compensation, strip out taxes on business that only end in higher prices, and finally we must have a complete re-set of government thinking on a par with that which wrenched China out of poverty enforced by ideology into the first league of world economies.

We have the people. We know how to do it. We need to give full rein to the entrepreneurial spirit South Africans have in abundance. It will be the quickest way to haul ourselves out of the historical and economic dead-end we have been cornered into.

Let others rationalise. Nothing they can say will drown out the thunderous shout of common sense: Only the private sector can get us out of the morass of incompetence and inefficiency into which we have been driven.

We must roll up our sleeves and seize the opportunity. By standing firm. By standing together. And by standing up for what is right.

Jacques Moolman
President of the Cape Chamber of Commerce & Industry.