President Thabo Mbeki will meet senior executives of FirstRand in Pretoria on Tuesday, South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported.
The meeting, at the request of First National Bank (FNB), was expected to discuss the bank’s controversial campaign against crime which was withdrawn at the last minute.
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 wanted to meet him, and that maybe FNB officials would explain why they decided to act on their own outside the business groupings.
”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. – Sapa