EDITORIAL: Free business from state’s shackles
In yet another bafflingly counterproductive legislative push, the tourism ministry under Derek Hanekom has tabled a raft of suggestions to regulate the mushrooming Airbnb sector
It is hardly necessary for the FM to remind voters that election pledges and post-electoral reality tend to inhabit parallel worlds. But it is disturbing that, even as President Cyril Ramaphosa spent his last weekend of campaigning by promising to remove barriers to investment and end policy uncertainty, his head of economic transformation, Enoch Godongwana, and his tourism minister, Derek Hanekom, were effectively doing the opposite. In an interview with Carte Blanche, Godongwana indicated that South Africans’ pension savings may be redirected to fund the coal mines that money-guzzling Eskom desperately needs since banks like Nedbank and Standard Bank are pulling away from financing coal projects.
And, in yet another bafflingly counterproductive legislative push, the tourism ministry under Hanekom has tabled a raft of suggestions, some of them overwhelmingly obnoxious, to regulate the mushrooming Airbnb sector. These proposals could end up hobbling a fantastically successful,...
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