Chief justice challenges business

The country has too many pieces of legislations making it difficult to do business, but there was no excuse for sitting back and failing to challenge the law. Addressing the business community and the legal fraternity during a lunch at a Durban hotel on Thursday, the country’s judicial head, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng encouraged businesses to make robust objections when they felt laws were harming trade and industry. “These legislations can be revisited. If something affects you directly as the business community, make your objections robustly and knock on the doors of government to air your concerns. You have a vital role to play in providing opportunities to the unemployed. “There are many who look up to us, precisely because we have the opportunity to make a difference. And we dare not, when solutions are required of us, settle down in our comfort zones, pursue expediency and self interest when we should be making a difference in the lives of many,” Mogoeng said.

He said it was time for South Africans in the business sector to identify what divides them, solve those challenges that they are able to solve and spend time identifying what unites them. “The possibility of working together regardless of race, as simple human beings who are stuck with each other in a country that is blessed with immeasurable natural and mineral resources, and seek to make the most of that. “If we could bury our differences to the point where we could find it possible, after the death of Chris Hani, to conclude a constitution-making process and vote, hold peaceful elections more than once, then no problem is too difficult for South Africa to solve,” he said. Mogoeng called for businesses to search for ways that would give the unemployed a sense of belonging because nothing creates more problems than the hunger and poverty that forces one to sleep under a bridge not knowing where one’s next meal will come from. He said these were some of the things that divide us.

Businesses should participate in rooting out practices that bring the business community into disrepute, he said. “I was talking to the president of the chamber about fronting, which is the subject I’ve had the privilege of writing judgment about. This is designed to empower the previously disadvantaged economically, and our previously advantaged compatriots use ignorant black or young people as managing directors of companies when they are nothing but gardeners or something like that.” “It’s got to be a concerted effort by all to expose such activities. Business should frown upon people who receive tenders using underhand tactics. “The more the perception that we are corrupt, the more potential investors become reluctant to come and invest in our country,” Mogoeng said. He said South Africa had the potential to influence the continent’s economic policies if everyone spoke out on corruption. “My principle is simple, because my soul is not available to the highest bidder, I’ll speak out against corruption.

“The time for quotable quotes is over. This is the time to confront the real issues in South Africa and in Africa.” Asked to comment on the issue over Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Mogoeng said the matter was sub judice and declined to comment.