In my youth, I was fond of the old soapbox. I was part of the Wapping picket in the late 1980s, a staunch unionist fighting Margaret Thatcher’s erosion of worker rights. I have long supported unfettered access to information. Now I’ve ventured into the world of small business. With my husband and our best friend, I run an inbound travel company bringing overseas golfers to South Africa on specialised holidays. And I have been battling to come to terms with the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
You’d think that for an old hack and soapbox queen, freedom of information would be sacrosanct. But the Act takes things too far even for this former militant. The new legislation requires all “private bodies” — every business not involved in the public service — to compile a manual disclosing the whereabouts of virtually everything from financial statements and bank records to correspondence and proof of compliance with other laws. This in case someone in future decides to exercise their right to information. The law then insists that the manual is filed with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC); published in the Government Gazette (a costly business); and posted on a website, if available.
It’s not easy trying to invest in South Africa’s future and help its economy grow. We began building our company 18 months ago, combining our resources and experience to enter one of South Africa’s fastest-growing industries. Getting government advice proved impossible, and after being bounced from pillar to post we landed up at South African Tourism, which passed the buck to a private organisation, the Southern African Tourism Services Association (Satsa).
At Satsa we got the help we needed and the support of industry colleagues. Unfortunately, that did not extend to financial assistance. We sank our life savings into the business, a huge leap of faith. That faith is not shared by the powers that be. The government seems uninterested in South Africa’s small business sector. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Penuell Maduna seems not to understand why small businesses are so confused by the information law and outraged at its invasive requirements.
The SAHRC website is supposed to give helpful information on the Act’s requirements and how to fulfil them. Here is some of its “advice”: “The … Act requires all public and private bodies to compile manuals; public and private bodies are defined as follows in terms of the Act: ‘public body’ means *(a) any department of state or administration in the national or provincial sphere of government or any municipality in the local sphere of government; or *(b) any other functionary or institution when — (i) exercising a power or performing a duty in terms of the Constitution or a provincial constitution; or (ii) exercising a public power or performing a public function in terms of any legislation. *’Private body’ means — (a) a natural person who carries or has carried on any trade, business or profession, but only in such capacity; (b) a partnership which carries or has carried on any trade, business or profession; or (c) any former or existing juristic person, but excludes a public body.
“The Act applies to all records held by public and private bodies, and the manual should provide a potential requester: with contact information of the body; with sufficient detail on the procedure on how to make a request; with the classification of the subjects and categories of the records that a body holds.” And so on and so on…
What does the government hope to achieve by this? Does it seriously believe compliance will, as Richard Calland put it in last week’s Mail & Guardian, “empower the masses”? Will people besiege my company with requests to see my contract of employment and a full set of financial records? Will Joe Public insist on reading its correspondence? When am I going to find time for all this red tape? And when does the public’s right to information become an infringement of my, and my company’s right to privacy? And, most worryingly — could the requirements enable the government to keep check, Big Brother-style, on what we are up to?
A step further and a different scenario emerges — where businesses are “flagged” as pro- or anti-government. One can visualise an economic landscape dominated by state favouritism.
Am I being paranoid? All the warning bells in my old activist head ring when I read the Act. At worst it smacks of Thatcherite authoritarianism, and at best it offers no succour to those of us trying to scrape a living and stay proudly South African.
Sharon van Wyk is a freelance journalist and co-director of Tee-Off Travel