President Thabo Mbeki and senior leaders of the FirstRand group will meet soon to discuss the controversial First National Bank (FNB) campaign against crime, Mbeki said in an interview on SAfm on Sunday.
The meeting is at the request of FNB, which is part of the FirstRand group.
FNB cancelled its multimillion-rand anti-crime campaign on February 2 after meeting with government officials.
Mbeki said he did not know why certain business leaders had decided to act outside the structures such as the Presidential Big Business Working Group and Business Against Crime.
He said the controversy surrounding the campaign, ”seemed to me to reflect that, in part, that perhaps we have not been loud and vocal enough in terms of what actually is being done.
”As to why particular elements of business would want to extricate themselves from a collective business intervention, I don’t know…”.
He had been told FNB officials wanted to meet him, and that perhaps they would be able to explain why they had decided to act on their own.
”There’s no point at which the government has acted in a manner that did not recognise that this [crime] indeed is a serious problem in the country.”
Mbeki said the controversy, which has been widely debated in the media, would not compromise the government’s partnership with business leadership in building the country.
In the lengthy interview Mbeki also touched on poverty and social-security grants, the international trade balance and industrial policy.
Mbeki reiterated the government’s opposition to a basic income grant but said it needed to enable the social security system to protect the vulnerable.
When asked if he thought South Africa had unified and reconciled, he said it was a difficult question to answer, but ”I would say no”.
”That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress … we need to, I think move further with regard to dismantling this legacy of the past. Let’s have more integrated human settlements and so you can see that black and white live together.” – Sapa