Instead of sitting back and allowing high unemployment, inequality, high murder rates and lawlessness to continue to thrive as engineered by the ANC government to ensure that black people remain poor and economically inactive, ActionSA has unveiled its own Inclusive Economic Empowerment (IEE) plan to change that trajectory.
This was the message from ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba, was speaking to residents in the community of Mabopane, north of Pretoria, on Thursday, outside what used to be his first factory, where his famous Black Like Me cosmetic products were made.
Mashaba expressed disappointment that what used to be a factory that employed as many 250 local people was now an office for Sassa grants which effectively made people dependent on the state.
The businessman said that like many South Africans, he too was excited in 1994 about what democracy would bring, especially after he had built a successful business under the restrictions of the apartheid government.
“I looked forward to an explosion of black entrepreneurship and new opportunities for the communities that had been excluded under the evil apartheid regime. Today, South Africa remains the most unequal society in the world with unemployment hovering around 44%.
“The high unemployment, inequality, the murder rate and lawlessness is not a mistake, it’s an engineered programme by the ANC government. This ANC government released criminals on us and opened our borders, allowing international crime syndicates and terrorist organisations to come and take business opportunities in our country so that they can feed international criminal syndicates,” Mashaba said.
Having been one of the few to start a successful business from the boot of his car, turning it into a business employing local people, Mashaba said it was possible for South Africans to turn things around, but not under the direction of the ANC government.
“I am saying to our people, we’ve got to really stop this as I am not prepared to sit back and allow the ANC government to destroy this country. I want to demonstrate to South Africans that it is possible, because I had built my own factory by the time I had reached 30 years of age. I had my own factory and was expanding.”
The IEE, Mashaba said, was based on the principle that solving a problem required an understanding of the cause of that problem, rather than just addressing the symptoms.
Through this, he said, an Opportunity Fund would be introduced to reform employment equity measures, adopt a universal basic income stimulus, address persistent spatial injustice issues and promote social cohesion.
He said 10% of the fund would be allocated to education, 30% to entrepreneurial funding, 35% to infrastructure projects and 25% to further investments that promoted the sustainability of the fund.
“No politician, not even the president or the minister of finance, will be able to interfere in the business of the fund. The fund’s business and financial statements will be publicly available, with cutting-edge financial technology used to track and report every cent of expenditure,” he said.
A Universal Basic Income Stimulus would be introduced to provide a regular unconditional cash payment to every South African that signed up for it, with the aim of boosting consumer spending, stimulating economic activity and uplifting the standard of living across the nation.
The stimulus would, according to the party, help ensure that no one went hungry under the ActionSA government.
The Star