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/ 17 September 2007
When Ahmed Mursal was held up by a drug-desperate gunman in the tuckshop where he was working in the Cape Flats township of Delft, he offered to buy the gun for R250. He told the gunman he could pay only R30 then, but would speak to his Somali brothers, one of whom was sure to want to buy the gun. If the gunman brought the gun the next day, Mursal would pay the balance of R220. The gunman accepted.
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/ 11 September 2007
For observers of small business development it is desperately predictable. A government agency, corporation, municipality, academic institution or local entrepreneur stands up and declares the end of joblessness in South Africa. The solution is small business development, it says and, specifically, this pilot project — always a pilot — on which it is about to embark.
Small businesses find themselves in a catch-22 when it comes to BEE verification. Officially, they are exempt from the heavy red tape and costs involved in scoring a business’s BEE compliance. But, increasingly, they find that they have to submit to red tape and costs just to prove that they are indeed exempt.
An ambitious plan by the department of labour to create a massive database of all job vacancies in South Africa is being backed by official small business bodies, which raises serious questions about the state of small-business advocacy in the country. For several weeks, no media picked up on the strange plan after Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana announced it in his budget vote speech in Parliament.
As the retail boom continues in South Africa, fears are mounting that the concentration of power in the hands of large retailers and shopping centre landlords is growing unchecked in tandem with excessive mall development, which is wreaking havoc among independent retailers in the country’s CBDs and high streets.
In the wake of recent developments at the competition authorities, which have so far caused more disappointment than relief for small businesses, an intriguing possibility emerges that an age-old and basic practice by Telkom may well be anti-competitive. Telkom charges business clients R132 a month for the rental of an ordinary business line.
Khula Enterprise Finance, the government’s small business finance agency, is planning to stick its toe into the turbulent water of direct lending to owner-managed businesses this year. It’s a sore toe, stepped upon by critics for being ineffective, stubbed by failed microcredit schemes and some internal fraud.
The small business tax amnesty runs out at the end of this month but, so far, fewer than 5 000 of South Africa’s estimated 114 000 minibus-taxi operators have applied for it, setting the scene for what could be a major clash between the South African Revenue Service (Sars) and the country’s most difficult industry.
Thousands of small shop owners throughout South Africa are bearing the brunt of the national lottery freeze, with some reporting a dramatic loss of Saturday turnover and earnings. "It is now the second Saturday with no Lotto and my turnover on those two Saturdays has dropped by as much as 50%," says Jan Snyder, who runs Pasty’s, a convenience store in Durbanville.
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/ 23 February 2007
Millions of insects zapped with gamma-rays and let loose into the wild to destroy their mates. The very thought is enough to make any self-respecting greenie choke on his tofu. Actually, the sterile insect technique is as environmentally friendly as it gets, and forms a major part of "integrated pest management" as mainstream farmers move away from spraying poisons.
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/ 13 November 2006
South Africa seems to be so fixated on black economic empowerment (BEE) that the unprecedented white economic empowerment taking place is either not noticed, simply assumed to be natural, or denied. The fact that it makes for an uncomfortable acronym probably doesn’t help either. When FNB recently released a breakdown of the country’s most wealthy individuals, one headline read: "Many of SA’s super-rich are black."
When the Cabinet is handed the final version of the department of trade and industry’s Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Codes, small business will be watching to see how government intends to regulate them. Governments have always been keen to regulate business. But one would struggle to find an intervention more subtle, far-reaching and — here’s the rub — more complicated than the BEE codes.
The clearest sign that South Africa does not yet have a culture of entrepreneurship is the lack of understanding of how small businesses work.
The small business community in South Africa has rapidly expanded over the past seven years. It is alive and kicking, with lots of painful growth, extraordinary successes, shattered dreams and ruined credit records.