Cutting the red tape is a joke

One could not but chortle at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation announcement in February he was “working to improve the business environment for companies of all sizes through a dedicated capacity in the Presidency to reduce red tape”.

Ramaphosa also said there were “too many regulations in this country that are unduly complicated, costly and difficult to comply with”.

In May he told mining executives and investors at the 2022 Mining Indaba red tape would be cut following SA’s dropping into the bottom 10 of the Fraser Institute’s Investment Attractiveness Index rankings.

“We are standing at 75th of 84, which is our worst-ever ranking,” Ramaphosa said.

He went on to say, “South Africa” needed to move “with greater purpose and urgency to remove the various impediments to the growth and development of the industry”.

“We understand very clearly the need to fix to the regulatory and administrative problems,” he said.

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With the amount of red tape binding policies built on policies holding red tape to account for the red tape tying it all up into an incomprehensible blot of red tape which keeps red tape factories like our ministers in jobs, we would need a red tape policy …. Damn it, that’s not going to work either.

In July, Ramaphosa said government was removing red tape for job applications in the public sector. Incredible progress has been made on this, by removing the certification of copies of references/educational qualifications/etc, you know, the stuff which speaks to a candidates suitability for a position.

Faux qualifications should really help in preventing corruption in government.

Going back to the 2022 Mining Indaba, Ramaphosa said government was “working to further cut red tape for the registration of projects, to accelerate environmental approvals and to strengthen the capacity of Eskom and municipalities to link such projects to the grid”.

“According to the Minerals Council South Africa, around 4 000MW or R65 billion of such electricity generation capacity investment is in the pipeline,” Ramaphosa said. And in the pipeline those 4 000MW will stay for now.

These projects have to be built. By hand. By actual people. There is no little magic caravan waiting in someone’s back yard which at the pull of a rope will pop open and start delivering hundreds of kilowatts to the grid. And even if there were, the grid would probably melt because it has been so damaged by Eskom’s psychotic on again/off again drifting between load shedding levels.

No matter. There’s bound to be a “Red Tape Indaba” in the next four years, followed by a round table, which will use the findings of a panel of experts which built on the countrywide hearings into the matter following the submissions to the committee which only accepted those which were hand written in triplicate and hand delivered to the 19th floor of Somewhere Officialville where the lift wasn’t working.

All following the advertising and awarding of a tender which will be snapped up by the friend of an uncle in the government business who will blatantly ignore the eleventy million pages of red tape and regulations and policies surrounding the awarding of tenders to family and friends of government officials.

Cut red tape? In South Africa?

Surely the president doth jest.