Cape Town – If Small Business Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu has it her way, a lot of red tape will be cut in her second year on the job.
“We want to have a situation where there’s a one-stop shop, where the turnaround time for ensuring that you register, you do your SARS processing, you do everything – that must be able to be done in one place,” said Zulu in an exclusive Fin24 studio interview a day after her maiden budget speech.
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Zulu also wants Sefa (finance body) and Seda (development body) in one place. “What’s the point of getting Seda to assist you in terms of your business plan and then … you find that Sefa is very far away from there,” she said.
“We believe that core location is going to be able to assist us so that the turnaround time doesn’t take too long,” she said.
Zulu keen to get snipping
Asked when she would turn words to action, Zulu said: “If it depended on me, it would have happened already in the year that I have been in office.
“However, you must consider that there is SARS [and] … a whole lot of other [barriers],” she said.
Registration is done by the Department of Trade and Industry (dti), who Zulu said she was engaging with. “That’s why we are saying we want to sign transversal agreements, which we can hold people accountable with,” she said.
“It’s one thing to say it, it’s another to do it, but we are committed to making sure that we are the strong voice of small businesses in those structures,” she said.
DA MP and shadow minister of small business Toby Chance said in his budget rebuttal on Wednesday that Zulu could have an immediate impact “if she persuades the Presidency to invoke the 1987 Temporary Removal of Restrictions on Economic Activities Amendment Act”.
“This act gives the president sweeping powers to chop down the forest of regulations, red tape and market-unfriendly legislation the Zuma kingdom refuses to recognise is throttling business and job creation.”
You act, we’ll support
Finally, Zulu had this message to entrepreneurs in the country:
“It’s about themselves getting up and doing things for themselves. We can only just create the conducive environment, but when you are an entrepreneur, it’s about you getting up, going out and finding out how you can start your business, how you can develop your business, so that at the end of the day and when you come to us, it’s about us supporting you, rather than the other way round.”
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