President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced that his government would speed up efforts to cut red tape in order to remove obstacles that continued “to scupper investment prospects” in South Africa’s districts and provinces.
Ramaphosa said this on Friday during a District Development Model visit to the Ugu district in KwaZulu-Natal, where the visit focused on the development of the Eastern Seaboard.
The area stretches between KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces, along a 600 km coast from Durban to Buffalo City — and covers an area of four districts and 17 municipalities.
The president said cutting red tape would help attract economic development to improve the country’s growth prospects in the areas concerned.
“If we really want economic development, we must cut red tape. We must make sure that things happen,” the president said.
He said he was aware of a “lackadaisical tendency” of requisite documents not being timeously processed in the relevant channels of government.
“We must make sure that things happen because it quite often discourages investors. It makes investors become discouraged, and they walk away,” the president said.
He added: “I don’t want anyone to stay in my way of getting investors to stay here.”
The president said government would in due course be moving in a determined manner to ensure that it cut down on “unnecessary bureaucratic clutter.”
NM/jn/APA