Commitment to nurturing small business is very much secondary to appeasing powerful labour (and to a degree, big business) interests, as well as its ‘transformationist’ agenda. So, bargaining council agreements are imposed on small firms without their participation or consent, labour legislation weighs disproportionately on them – to the detriment of job creation – while empowerment demands skew their ability to participate in value chains. Just where the government’s priorities lay on that last issue was made clear by its tourism relief measures, in which B-BBEE status loomed especially large.
