Free Market Foundation (FMF) Director Jasson Urbach delivers the following Christmas message from the Bryanston-based independent, non-profit, public benefit organisation:
With so much public focus on the need for reform in South Africa, the FMF’s work has been essential to ensure that critical analyses are conducted and to monitor and comment on proposed amendments to legislation that often have not only short-term negative consequences but also the potential to affect future generations. As a think tank, it puts forward solutions to some of the country’s most pressing problems: unemployment, poverty, growth, education, health care, electricity supply, and more.
Three of our most important projects are:
- The Khaya Lam Land Reform Project
There are about seven to 10 million state-owned (mostly municipal) apartheid-style rental homes countrywide that are crying out to be converted into ownership with full freehold title. The FMF’s Khaya Lam Land Reform Project has the ambitious but achievable objective of transferring all of these properties into a spectacular never-before-available transformation project that can, over the next few years, change the lives of millions of South Africans forever.
- The FMFs Labour Law Challenge
According to the latest available data from Statistics South Africa there are between 5.2 and 8.4 million unemployed people in South Africa. Certain labour laws… are exacerbating the country’s unemployment problem. We have thus instituted a constitutional labour law challenge that, by changing a single word, ‘must’ to ‘may’ in Section 32 (2) of the Labour Relations Act 1995, would halt the imposition on small firms of conditions of employment that result in their closure and loss of jobs.
- The FMF’s Energy Policy Unit
Blackouts and power outages are affecting everyone. No other country in the world has a vertically integrated monopoly like Eskom that is responsible for the generation, transmission and a large part of the distribution of electricity. The FMF advocates for South Africa to establish a market for electricity and to institute reforms that will allow independent power producers a greater role in generating electricity.
The FMF will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year of promoting economic and civil liberties for all South Africans. With support… the FMF will continue to work on until it concludes that everyone is free and safe and that its services are no longer required.
Details: Free Market Foundation fmf@mweb.co.za, 011 884 0270.
