MICHAEL AVERY: Expropriation is happening in SA
It’s not the land but capital, which is being extracted by competition bureaucrats using ‘public interest guidelines’
It’s time the DA touched gloves and got into the fight. In the shadow of Pretoria’s Union Buildings, far from the bogeymen of “white genocide” and land grabs without compensation that preoccupy the tinfoil-hat corners of Washington, a more insidious and institutionalised form of expropriation is quietly strangling investment and punishing precisely the kind of enterprise SA so desperately needs.
No, it’s not the land, it’s capital. And it’s being expropriated by bureaucrats with public interest guidelines. As I’ve written time and again, the Competition Commission, that sacred cow of technocratic righteousness, has turned merger control into a form of state-sanctioned shakedown. Every time two businesses try to consummate a transaction, large or small, local or foreign, the commission saunters into the room like a crooked priest, demanding a tithe. Not for its own coffers, of course. That would be crude. No, it’s a holy tax for workers’ trusts, for empowerment schemes, for en...
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