Speech to the British Chamber of Business in Southern Africa

This evening DA leader Mmusi Maimane and I addressed a gathering of business people at the Inanda Club in Johannesburg at the invitation of the British Chamber of Business in Southern Africa. Their monthly meetings are an opportunity for discussion and networking among an important collection of leaders in the SA business community.

Below is the text of my prepared speech.

It is an honour and my pleasure to be invited to speak to you here this evening. The decision to re-establish the British Chamber of Business in Southern Africa is to be welcomed by everyone with a stake in building relations between Britain and this region.

British – South Africa trade relations have traditionally been very close. South Africa is Britain’s sixth biggest trading partner globally, while Britain remains South Africa’s seventh largest export market.

Chance Brothers illuminating the world - appearing last night in Birmingham, UK

Publisher of History West Midlands magazine, Mike Gibbs has a passion for the Black Country, an area centred on Wolverhampton, Dudley and Smethwick a few miles west of Birmingham in the UK. He was born and bred there and apart from a few years in South Africa has lived there all his life.

A successful and now retired businessman, he devotes most of his time to establishing and supporting ventures which aim to uncover the rich history of this part of Britain, which was the crucible of the Industrial Revolution and home to many famous inventors and industrial dynasties.

One of these dynasties was the Chance family, who from the 1770s built a trading then a manufacturing business of considerable scale which for five generations led Britain's glassmaking industry. At its height in the early 20th century the firm employed over 3 500 people. The factory finally closed its doors in 1981.

Solving the small business finance conundrum

Today's Sunday Times carries my opinion piece on small business finance - you can read it here.

I had to cut it to 750 words. For the full version, read on below.

Most surveys of small business cite difficulties in accessing finance as one of the top three challenges they face. But talk to providers of finance and they say the opposite: there is a scarcity of fundable small businesses out there.

Solving this conundrum is at the heart of South Africa’s biggest challenge: how to create the 11 million new jobs we need by 2030 to reduce unemployment to 6% from its current 36%.

Attacks on foreign nationals driven by competition for resources

Film-goers will recall director Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi movie District 9 for its dystopian portrayal of a Johannesburg township under the menacing influence of the Prawns. These creatures, from a distant planet, established a precarious existence in a camp set up to keep them away from locals, who despised them for being “non-humans” yet admired their advanced technology and weaponry.

The film was released in 2009, shortly after South Africa suffered an outbreak of violence against foreigners which left over sixty people dead. The parallels between these attacks and the anti-Prawn sentiments of District 9 were not lost on political and social commentators. 

The 2008 attacks were labelled xenophobic because most of the victims were foreigners. They were accused of taking jobs from South Africans and using unfair and sometimes illegal practices to out-wit local traders, putting them out of business and leading to widespread resentment and envy. 

BizNews carries my OpEd on Minister Zulu's speech on al-Bashir's escape from justice

Alec Hogg's BizNews website features my opinion piece on why it was wrong for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to be allowed to leave South Africa, defying a court order to detain him.

See it here.

The DA has been vocal on this issue. Our view is categorical: South Africa must uphold the rule of law and the constitution. Our international commitments go further than Africa.

Read this interview in City Press with a former ICC judge for a broader perspective on the issue.

Minister Zulu chooses African unity over the rule of law

Minister of Small Business Development, Lindiwe Zulu, has clearly forgiven Robert Mugabe for describing her as "a stupid woman" and as "a little streetwalker" after she called for the 2013 Zimbabwe elections to be delayed.

In this evening's snap debate on the escape of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir from the AU Summit in Johannesburg last Monday, Minister Zulu was deployed to trot out the ANC party line that African unity is more important than observing both international and South African law for the government in which she serves.

The decision to let him leave the country was a collective cabinet decision, she said.

False Bay TVET college - Centre for Entrepreneurship

Yesterday I visited one of the three Centres for Entrepreneurship that have opened their doors since the DTI conceived of them a couple of years ago, before the formation of the Department of Small Business Development. This is one of the better ideas the DTI has had, among the raft of programmes devised in the past twenty years aimed at stimulating entrepreneurship in South Africa.

My visit confirmed for me there is no substitute to seeing something face to face, and speaking to the people involved, if you want to get a true picture of what is going on. In Parliamentary speak, I was conducting an "oversight visit."