Visting small businesses in Soweto with Mmusi Maimane

Today I visited the Emdeni Industrial Park in Soweto with DA Parliamentary Leader, Mmusi Maimane. This was the first leg in the DA Small Business Tour which my deputy, Henro Kruger (who also came along today) and I will embark on over the coming few months. Its purpose is to meet small business owners all over the country and learn more about the conditions they are working under, the challenges they face and what government and big business are doing to support them.

You can  read the statement Mmusi's office issued today here

If today's experience is anything to go by we will encounter businesses struggling to make ends meet, working in premises with little or no investment and largely cut off from metropolitan economies and formal supply chains. This situation is hampering their ability to grow and create the jobs the country needs to avoid a worsening of the unemployment crisis.

Emdeni Industrial Park and others like it were built in the 1980s by the apartheid government which by then had recognised that townships could not forever exist as dormitory settlements supplying labour to the cities and suburbs where most of the businesses and employment opportunities existed. We visited Emdeni because it's in my constituency but the much larger Orlando West Industrial Park is perhaps better known because of its management's attempts, stretching over several years, to have conditions improved by its government owners and their vocal protests at the raw deal they have been dealt.

Both parks are dilapidated, with pot-holed roads, poor or non-existent signage, broken windows and under-maintained services such as lighting and sewerage. The premises are cramped, with many of the businesses overflowing into open space and roadways making getting around very difficult.

The first business owner we met ran a motor repairs shop, and had occupied the same building for nearly thirty years. He complained of constant harassment from the police and city officials, who periodically arrived, confiscated materials and tools, insisted on imposing petty regulations and generally made life difficult. Doing business today, he said, was harder than under the apartheid government.

This is a refrain we often hear, not just from business people, and it makes the DA's political message more complicated than it already is. When we point this out we are immediately accused of wanting to bring back apartheid, which is of course nonsense, but the ANC has taken delight in distorting our  message. Cyril Ramaphosa was not above using this misleading tactic in the election, when he said if the DA were elected we would 'bring back the Boers' - an unforgivably crude scare tactic. Playing the race card has become an all-too-frequent attempt by the ANC to paint the DA as a white, counter-revolutionary party. By descending to this level they just show how threadbare their political approach is.

It is unconscionable that we listen to small black businessmen telling us things were better under apartheid, twenty years after we hailed a new democratic dispensation. That is the real scandal, and the DA needs to shout this out as loud as we can.

A group of activists from my constituency, Soweto West, came along and heard the conversations between the business owners, Mmusi and me. I am sure they understood how important it is to get this message out whenever an opportunity arises.