President Cyril Ramaphosa and big business have agreed that tackling crime, but more especially corruption, will be high on the agenda in 2024, with an emphasis on solving the country’s energy and logistics problems.
This follows a virtual meeting between Ramaphosa’s executive, including the leadership of the SA Police Service (SAPS) and National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) as well as some of SA's most prominent business leaders Tuesday.
“Since we began, we have made significant progress in establishing structures and ways of working, mobilising resources and driving implementation of key actions. We see this partnership as evidence of the business community’s commitment to building our country and overcoming the challenges that we face,” Ramaphosa said.
In the joint statement, Discovery Health CEO and Business Unity SA’s Adrian Gore added that despite the partnership between business and the government achieving some success towards the eventual resolution of SA's energy and logistics challenges through at Eskom and Transnet, the pace of delivery across the initiative seems to be “plateauing”.
“We’ve agreed with the president that delays will be given urgent attention and we will all ensure that momentum is maintained, key decisions are made and policies implemented in line with agreed time lines…. We need to act with a greater sense of urgency and determination to confront these challenges, given their severe impact on the economy as a whole,” Gore added.
The meeting agreed on the need for a forensic analysis centre, the capacitation of the 10111 emergency response call centre, a greater focus on the promulgation of the National Prosecuting Authority Amendment Bill which is currently before parliament with the aim of strengthening ability of law enforcement agencies investigate and prosecute major criminal syndicates. Once those things are in place, the meeting also resolved that government would also partner with business to set up a digital forensics unit to strengthen the state’s ability to successfully prosecute graft.
This comes after the NPA’s Investigating Directorate (ID) blamed a shortage of specialised forensic accountants, auditors and financial investigators in its ranks for court defeats in state-capture cases thus far.
The NPA has failed to have the Guptas, former president Jacob Zuma’s associates, extradited to SA to account for state capture. More recently, the Middelburg specialised commercial crimes court threw out the state's R2.2bn fraud, corruption and money-laundering case against former Eskom boss Matshela Koko due to "unreasonable delays”.
Organised business agreed with the government in June to work together on energy, logistics and combatting crime, the three priority areas business identified as critical to turning the economy around.
They have established joint working groups that will report back to Ramaphosa regularly.
CEOs of big corporates such as Discovery through Gore, Anglo American’s Nolitha Fakude, Remgro’s Jannie Durand and Sanlam’s Paul Hanratty are the leaders involved in the partnership with the government.
Government ministers and directors-general, as well as Eskom and Transnet leaders are among those populating the energy, logistics and anti-crime work streams.
This collaboration was initiated with the aim of significantly growing SA’s economy, and restoring public and investor confidence through critical interventions to address the key challenges of energy, logistics, and crime and corruption.
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