Break+the+Cycle,+Dominic+Tweedie,+Business+Day+Letters

Business Day, Johannesburg, Letters, 20 April 2006
=Break the cycle=

The article about rural IT service licences by Lesley Stones, Licensed for failure in the sticks (April 18), refers. It is a suitable epitaph for any number of small business development projects around Africa, and especially in SA.

Vigorously urged on by big business, such projects are supposed to operate on the margins of the economy, where profits are too slim for monopolies to bother with.

Any kind of success is extremely rare. Even bare survival of such enterprises is highly exceptional. And if a small business should by chance discover a way of making good money it will very quickly be captured, bought out, or driven out by predators from the mainstream.

The details in the article tell the whole story — not only for information technology (IT), but also by extension for the whole pitiful portfolio of leftover business “opportunities”, whether rural or urban, afforded to hopeful black aspirants.

What is it all about? It is hardly welfare. Fakery and propaganda would be nearer the mark. The economy will expand only through the growth of its major constituents and not in the barren sticks and urban wastelands they have shunned.

This guilty truth is covered up by hoopla and ballyhoo about small business development.

The trick buys time for the monopolies. Consultants also do well. Politicians churn the scam for votes. Taxpayers’ money goes down the drain or into pockets. Sadly, a lot of people go bust. But worst of all, the proper and necessary planned growth of the country is postponed once again.

Why is SA going around in circles? When will we have a plan that breaks the killing cycle that protects the awful, cynical status quo, and instead takes a straight line towards universal prosperity?

Lombardy East
 * Dominic Tweedie**

303 words