Certain manufacturing activities are also restricted to citizens and citizen-owned companies. Economic activities like manufacturing of school uniforms, protective clothing, school furniture, burglar bars and milling of sorghum are reserved for citizens and citizen-owned enterprises in order to encourage Citizen Economic Empowerment (CEE). This is because the government pro-actively encourages citizen businesses and entrepreneurs. Again, certain categories of tenders are restricted to citizen-owned companies only while companies where citizens own a majority get preference during tendering. The CEE is one of the good initiatives by government to try to diversify our mining driven economy. The government has been criticised for failing to diversify the economy and one of the initiatives it came up with is the CEE. A few days ago, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Banny Molosiwa told the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that some local citizen companies are very dishonest.
Molosiwa said that although the government encourages citizen-owned companies to grow and that certain categories of business are reserved for these companies, some of them provide poor service and goods. She mentioned that one of the biggest challenges faced by her ministry in its quest to promote citizen empowerment is that most local companies provide poor quality goods.She gave the example of a company given a tender to supply her ministry with diaries. This company was supposed to produce the diaries locally. Instead of sticking to the agreement, the company sourced the diaries from South Africa. To make matters worse, the diaries were printed in Afrikaans. This is one of the many examples that some local businesses are very fraudulent when it comes to doing business. Their ethics and professionalism leave a lot to be desired. They either fail to supply goods on time or fail to deliver at all. That is why most of them are dominant customers in the legal notices in newspapers popularly known as 'in the matter between'.When they are preferentially given business, they prefer to live beyond their means instead of delivering first.Because they are excited by luxurious things, they end up ruining their businesses which then go under the hammer.This is despite the fact that they were mentored before they set up business. The government is totally blameless for this type of irresponsible behaviour. People cannot act irresponsibly and then blame the government when things go wrong. It is high time people are accountable for their actions.
