The state settling case out of court shows they care little about the poor

You know what the most anxiety provoking thing for a musician is?

Play them a scale, like C-major but omit the last note. It drives them crazy!

You know what the most anxiety provoking thing for a lawyer is? Being invested in a case but not getting to see the final result.

You know the feeling too. Many of us were itching to hear what would be said further in the Prince Andrew sexual assault case and then, just like that… Poof! Settled.

When it comes to the people who set the rules though, it would be nice to know, publicly, how they react when it comes to legal pressure.

If you look back in time to when it was all the rage that certain Chinese people would be able to benefit from BEE, you’ll recall that that fight went through the courts. In fact, it went all the way through to a judgement.

Granted, the state didn’t even put up a fight, but at least as the public we got to see the arguments, and while the judgement was hardly a paragraph or two, we still got a return on our invested interest.

Today, here we sit with a foreign company who’s apparently employing a labour force of 90% foreign nationals against South Africa’s 60% local requirement. We were put in a position to be pretty angry about this and start asking questions.

What next?

Well, it seems they’re reaching an out of court settlement, and we’re supposed to be happy with that? Surely, if the okes making our phones and 5G towers are opposed to obeying employment laws, we should be updated about what’s happening there.

Also Read: Huawei and Labour Department to reach agreement out of court

The more we know about it, the more we can challenge the absolutely ridiculously, stupidly poor, idiotic manner of budgeting our government takes.

In this last week, we found out where our money is going:

• R15 billion for small business loan guarantees
• R76 billion for job creation programmes (excluding the additional R18.4 billion for the Presidential Employment Initiative)
• R3.33 trillion over the next three years for social wage to support vulnerable and low-income households

Those are just the few line items directed at jobs and social security and yet, for some reason, a massive multi-national was allowed to run in our country and bring in 90% of its own work force. Sure they’re invested but wow! It’s not like those returns all stay in South Africa.

Also Read: Alliance partners not impressed with budget as job creation ‘falls short’

And nobody said a thing about it until a month ago. And nothing’s done about it, save for an out of court settlement.

Nope, we deserve better.

If we’re really expected to believe that it’s justified to spend over 100 billion on job creation, we cannot be expected to believe the state won’t fork out a few million to show multi-nationals that they mean business.

Take it through the courts and let the country see that the laws in place do protect them. Instead, with an out of court settlement, you’re showing your own people that foreign money is more important than their financial security, and if somebody is caught breaking the rules to protect your people, you can make a deal and sort it out.

No! There should be no deal making on the livelihood of your people, especially not in instances where you believe, in another, more convenient place, with other people’s money, it’s worth over R100 billion.

Even if the settlement is made public (pause to have a laugh), it’s just a poor showing to South Africa’s jobless that the mechanisms meant to protect them, have failed and the custodians of those mechanisms were okay with that.

The mixed messages are just so profound. But I shouldn’t complain, it’s not like we got a nice tax relief or two in this budget only to find out, the next day, that electricity will go up nearly 10%.

Oh… Wait….