Don't look to SME ministry for salvation - chamber

IN RESPONSE to the story in which Dr Michael Herrington articulated his reservations and concerns about the present and future performance of the small business development ministry and its minister Lindiwe Zulu, a chamber and round table chairperson said he is concerned that the ministry is not up to the task of building entrepreneurship in South Africa.

Edgar Dhlomo, who is the chairperson of the Inyanda Chamber of Commerce in KwaZulu-Natal and the chairperson of the Global Business Round Table, said we should be busy at work, acquiring systematised knowledge about entrepreneurship.

He writes this guest post:

Over the years (since 1970 when I started business), I have become very passionate about the subject of entrepreneurship, its spirit and morality.

My contribution to the topic therefore is more of assisting the discussion and debate in order to help improve the plight of the small entrepreneur out there, thereby coming closer to finding a solution to the problem.

I have read quite a number of articles about entrepreneurship and small business by different people. In the main, there are certainly very crucial omissions and mistaken definitions of the spirit and morality of entrepreneurship.

The superficial understanding and misrepresentation of entrepreneurship has led some to coin a bizarre and derogatory term, ‘tenderpreneur’, to denote those who are into business through tenders only, with no innovation or entrepreneurship.

In this context, Prof Hans L Zetterberg remarked as follows:

“There’s no king or general, prophet or philosopher standing at the gate of our contemporary civilisation. Instead we find the towering figures of the entrepreneur and his spiritual cousin - the innovator.

“Together they have reshaped life on this planet and made it possible for millions of ordinary men and women to live as affluently as old time lords. They have brought all continents, races, cities and villages together into a global network of trade and communications.

“They have taught recent generations a more thorough use of resources on this earth.”

Both liberal and Marxist environments tend to ignore the entrepreneur and innovation and only speak of capital and labour as the only two major elements in production.

It is Dr Tacker who has added the entrepreneur as an indispensable factor of production - independent of and between labour and capital.

The spirit of entrepreneurship brings labour and capital together in production enterprise. It is a catalyst without which both labour and capital would be idle.

At the foundation of great achievements of our civilisation, lies a partnership of innovators and entrepreneurs to promote marketable innovations by attracting capital, organising labour into production and selling the products. The spirit of entrepreneurship is easy to recognise when we see it, but it is difficult to define formally.
    
We might see it as the integration of four elements:

- Development of marketable innovations
- The charisma to attract capital for their exploration
- The leadership to organise labour and technology for their production
- The marketing skills to distribute and sell them.

I do understand fully, Dr Herrington’s concerns about the small business department minister, when she cancelled an engagement where she was supposed to be a guest speaker, namely, the Anglo American sponsored Enterprise Development Conference, which is considered a key event on the entrepreneur calendar. It would be prudent indeed for the department to engage with relevant experts in a sector that is at a critical low-point in South Africa.

South Africa and the small business department should be busy at work, acquiring systematised knowledge about entrepreneurship, which at the present time is incomplete and has not spread through the community of social scientists.  

The topic of entrepreneurship has not even been amenable to the mathematics of economists. Our country lacks the databanks, specialised professorships, graduate courses, fellowships, research grants, journals and conferences.

In short, we lack the scholarly tools that make possible, a massive continuous research effort into entrepreneurship. So the most pivotal phenomenon of our civilisation (entrepreneurship) will continue being subject to many guesses and intuitive hypotheses, but few systematised facts and few, if any established theorems.

The fact of the matter is, the improving performance of small business in the country will not come from an avalanche of policy formulations, policy reforms, good intentions or throwing good money at the problem, nor will the battle be won within the inner sanctuaries of administration buildings or legislative assemblies.