In February, President Cyril Ramaphosa said “the era of big corporates creating thousands of jobs has passed”, and the idea mooted by the National Development Plan in 2012 — that by 2030, 90% of jobs in SA will be created by small, medium and micro enterprises — has now become a target the government is trying actively to achieve.
What is clear is that to have any chance of tackling SA’s catastrophic employment situation we need more firms, we need firms that will grow, and we need firms that will employ as many people as possible. Merely changing the balance between large corporates and small businesses will do little to achieve these goals. As the Centre for Development and Enterprise’s outgoing chair, Laurie Dippenaar, put it recently: “Firms are like babies; they are not born big, they grow big.
The more serious problem is the way the government imposed regulatory costs that make it difficult for small firms either to get started or to grow into bigger firms. The World Bank’sfigures, while not uncontroversial, provide an indication of relative regulatory hurdles and compliance costs in SA. These myriad obstacles increase the complications of doing business for all firms, but they make it especially difficult for small, new firms to compete with incumbents.
With what money? 🙄
This is a misleading headline. If you read the article, the headline should actually be “SA Unemployment Crisis: Government needs to reduce red tape, creating a business-friendly environment for SME’s to flourish”