You know what’s most terrifying for a musician? Play them a scale, such as C major, but omit the last note. It drives them crazy! You know what’s the most terrifying thing about a lawyer? Being invested in a business but not seeing the end result. You know the feeling too. Many of us were eager to hear what else would be said in the Prince Andrew sexual assault case and then, just like that… Poof! organized. However, when it comes to the people who make the rules, it would be nice to know,…
You know what’s most terrifying for a musician?
Play them a scale, such as C major, but omit the last note. It drives them crazy!
You know what’s the most terrifying thing about a lawyer? Being invested in a business but not seeing the end result.
You know the feeling too. Many of us were eager to hear what’s next in the Prince Andrew assault case and then, just like that… Poof! organized.
However, when it comes to the people who set the rules, it would be nice to know publicly how they react to legal pressure.
If you look back in time when it was all the rage that certain Chinese could benefit from BEE, you’ll remember that battle went through the courts. In fact, it went all the way to a judgment.
Granted, the state didn’t even resist, but as the public at least we got to see the arguments, and while the verdict was barely a paragraph or two, we still got a return on our invested interest.
Today we are here with a foreign company which apparently employs a workforce of 90% foreign nationals against South Africa’s 60% local requirement. We were put in a position to get pretty angry about this and start asking questions.
What now?
Looks like they’re coming to an amicable settlement, and we should be happy about that? Sure, if the okays that our phones and 5G towers are making conflict with obeying labor laws, we definitely need to be kept informed about what’s going on there.
Also read: Huawei and Labor Department to reach an out-of-court settlement
The more we know about it, the more we can challenge our government’s absolutely ridiculous, stupid, idiotic way of budgeting.
In this last week we found out where our money is going:
- R15 billion for small business loan guarantees
- R76 billion for job creation programs (excluding the additional R18.4 billion for the Presidential Employment Initiative)
- R3.33 trillion over the next three years for social wages to support vulnerable and low-income households
Those are just the few rules that focus on jobs and social security and yet for some reason a huge multinational company was allowed to run in our country and bring in 90% of its own workforce. Sure they are invested, but wow! It’s not like those returns all stay in South Africa.
Also read: Alliance partners unimpressed with budget as job creation ‘falls short’
And until a month ago, nobody said anything about it. And nothing is being done about it, except for an amicable settlement.
No, we deserve better.
If we are really to believe that it is justified to spend more than 100 billion on job creation, we cannot expect that the state will not spend a few million to show multinationals that they mean it.
Challenge it in the courts and show the country that the laws in force protect them. Instead, an amicable settlement shows your own people that foreign money is more important than their financial security, and if someone is caught breaking the rules to protect your people, you can make a deal and fix it.
New! No deal should be made about the livelihood of your people, especially in cases where you believe that it is worth more than R100 billion in another, more convenient place, with other people’s money.
Even if the settlement is made public (pause for a laugh), it’s just a bad way to show the unemployed in South Africa that the mechanisms designed to protect them have failed and that the custodians of those mechanisms had no problem with that.
The mixed messages are just so profound. But I shouldn’t complain, it’s not like we got a nice tax credit in this budget only to find out the next day that electricity will go up by almost 10%.
Oh wait….