Letter: ‘Government failed its people’

So where to from here? We have a number of businesses in this country where the owner is old, has no succession plan, children have left the country, but he wants to retire and it’s not a franchise. It’s a good business, how do we know this? Because it has provided for the entrepreneur’s family for many years, given his children the education to be able to find jobs overseas, given them the lifestyle and what they have.
If the owner does not find a buyer, he closes, takes a brilliant business with him and a number of jobs, but why? Why do these businesses close? Here, the banks and government lending agencies are at fault. The banks, being disingenuous, won’t fund entrepreneurs or staff to buy these businesses because the business does not have the correct level of financial information for the banks’ liking, but for years the owner has banked with a bank and the bank never raised the question of the correct level of financial information while the business owner was paying bank fees.
This is low-hanging fruit, buddy up a young entrepreneur with one of these business owners, the business owner transfers the skill and the entrepreneur takes over the business. The exiting business owner will be around whether by phone or email or any way to offer support. After all, this is a business he built and would not want to see it go under. There are staff and management who have been with these businesses for years and would be capable of taking over these businesses, but lack the money to buy them.
They would keep people employed and take the businesses even further. The exiting owner probably would not have kept up to date with latest trends, yet, times have changed, equipment and machinery has changed, we have the internet, the incoming entrepreneur would be able to implement and input this into the business and re-launch this already operational business into the stratosphere with a bit of spit and polish. Then it would be way better than any affirmative action policy, BEE or BBBEEE.
I am all about business and don’t give a hoot about politics and politicians. The following is from a business take:
Background : Going way back to 1948 when the National Party first won elections, the white population was out begging on the streets, pretty much what is happening today. The difference from now to then is that the National Party set about creating work opportunities by employing the unemployed in what would be seen as menial work. A job that comes to mind is a “Wheel Tapper” on the railways, I mean a person employed to go from wheel to wheel and tap it to see if it was still functional, as menial as it was, it was a job and that person could then put food on his family’s table and possibly even send the children to school or university, if they save well. Probably why there are so many state-owned enterprises.
In my opinion, and it is only my opinion, when the ANC took over, they systematically set about dismantling jobs and opportunities with their failed policies and quite frankly lack of business knowledge. Whether knowingly or willfully, they did exactly the opposite of what the National Party did, by giving jobs to friends and connections, deployment of cadres into positions they were not skilled to work in – which in part led to the white-skilled employees to vacate their jobs without transferring those skills, then hiring back those ex-employees as consultants at hugely inflated contract prices because the job had to be done.
Now the taxpayers are paying triple the price for that service than they were before and because that became a very lucrative pursuit for that white contractor, he was not going to share that skill. Hence, we have the municipalities we have today where there are no employees but only consultants.
Why do I raise this? Because this has become the norm for contractors and tenderpreneurs to work government jobs, because that is where the big salaries are and the opportunity for whatever you want. So, there is no need for me to be an entrepreneur and battle to start a business when I can use my political connections to climb on board the “new gravy train” and as we have seen “corruption train”, where consumers are paying three times more for the services than they used to since you always have to cover the inflated contractors’ price or the tenderpreneurs cut to get exactly the same service.
Government employees don’t add anything to the economy, they only take. They don’t start businesses, don’t create jobs and our government is one of the biggest in the world and it is as a result of the government saying if you want to do business in this country you do it with my connections or you don’t do it at all. This has created an enormously wealthy group who are not giving back versus when the national party was in government and helping businesses because businesses are the engine of our economy.
Our past can be likened to a war and what happens after a war, you rebuild. Japan is the prime example if you are able to get everyone to sign off the same hymn sheet. Many of our “born-frees” will hopefully never go through a war or experience a war, yet in many ways Covid-19 and the lockdown can be seen as their war and what do we do after a war? We rebuild.
We get in the trenches and we do what we have to do to rebuild a country. Every person, every pair of hands is required to rebuild an economy that has fallen over. It’s not every generation that has the opportunity to push the “restart button” but we have that opportunity right now.
At the Chamber, I always used to reiterate that it is the small business that drives and employs an economy and that South Africa’s small business market is 69 per cent of the business economy. It wasn’t until I read a report that our small businesses only accounted for mid 20 per cent of our economy that it became clear to me why we have such a high unemployment rate. It’s because the economy’s engine has stalled and the biggest employers in the country are government and big businesses who handle employees in a cavalier fashion, considering a big banking group who closed over 100 branches and laid the staff off in a cost-cutting exercise. But why when the banks made R27-billion profit the financial year before? Why would they need to create misery and contribute to a flaying economy?
I am all for an entrepreneur who starts up his own business and grows it into a mega business, taking what is due to him. It’s his business, he built it. But I am vehemently opposed to a corporate CEO or director earning 200 times an employee’s salary. No CEO is worth 100 or even 200 times his staff’s salary.
We can and will climb out of the hole that the government and its cronies have dug for us, only if we focus on rebuilding this country and ensure government does what it is elected to do and play its role of creating opportunities instead of sponging off society and sucking from the economy.
• Derek Fox is a retired member of the Ekurhuleni Aerotropolis Chamber of Commerce and Industry (EACCI), and proud member of The Rotary Club of Boksburg.
• The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Boksburg Advertiser.

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