Enough red tape to tie us all down

The author Lewis Carroll, who had a keen eye for the foibles of the powerful, told the story of a kingdom where cartographers worked on the most detailed map in the world, an exact replica of the land, corresponding with it point for point on a 1:1 scale. The empire suffered under the exquisite map, which blocked out the sun and killed the farmers' crops.

What a wonderful metaphor for the schemes politicians and bureaucrats dream up.

The skills-development system comes to mind, a grand attempt to map every possible skill in the world of work in "unit standards" through a vast bureaucracy called the Sectoral Education and Training Authorities.

Another one started off as a well-meaning attempt by legislators to create the most transparent society on earth. The Promotion of Access to Information Act renders all information kept by the state the property of the citizens of South Africa. They must have unimpeded access to it unless it would jeopardise state security or impinge on the privacy of others.

The act extends to the private sector as well. Any citizen may request information pertaining to themselves from any private organisation. Theoretically, this brings South Africa on par with the most transparent regimes in the world.

But our legislators, rather like the cartographers in Carroll's story, took it further, writing into the law a clause that says that every business and organisation in South Africa, from the Boksburg Bowling Club to Barloworld, must have an information manual.

This document is a list of files kept by the organisation - not every single document, but rather categories of documents, such as "invoices", "employment contracts", "quality control reports" and "customer profiles".

Magnanimously, the law says that information already in the public domain, such as a business's price list, need not be listed in its information manual. We don't want to create unnecessary red tape, do we?

Each organisation must post its information manual on its website, or, if it doesn't have one, keep it at its offices for the perusal of any citizen. Furthermore, each information manual must be submitted to the Human Rights Commission.

You can imagine the vainglorious glint in the eyes of those who conceived of this idea - a vast database listing every single folder on every hard drive and in every filing cabinet throughout the land; the biggest index of information in the world!

It would even contain an index of the back-of-a-cigarette-packet scribbles of an informal trader - there is no exemption for small businesses in this law.

It is harder to imagine what possibly could have been the reasoning behind the mad scheme. Perhaps the idea was that the upfront disclosure of organisations of what kind of documents they kept would prevent a business from claiming later on that it doesn't keep records of the kind that an aggrieved ex-worker, for example, is asking for.

Or perhaps it was thought that it would help citizens become aware of the existence of certain documents for the first time.

Whatever the reason, the remedy is completely disproportionate to the problem, its practicality close to zero and its efficacy highly dubious. Didn't a minister somewhere during the arms deal saga simply claim that certain documents which everybody knew existed got lost? Transparency is a culture, not a database.

Two things happened after the information manual clause came into effect. The first was the mushrooming of "consultants" who went from business to business, scaring the daylights out of them with the new law and then proposing to compile their information manuals for them for a small fee of, let's see, not much more than R1500 or so.

South Africa has a deep reservoir of these consultant-type entrepreneurs who emerge when the conditions are right.

The second was a belated, muted outcry from the business world about the effect of the requirement on small businesses and the senselessness of it all. As usual, small businesses themselves didn't complain. They are too busy trying to survive to follow legislation and take part in organised business. Most probably because of pressure from the more business-savvy parts of government - the National Treasury at that stage - the Department of Justice reluctantly put a five-year moratorium on the requirement for small businesses.

The moratorium will run out on December 31. It is unclear whether the government plans to extend it again, exempt small businesses from having to compile information manuals permanently, or scrap the idea altogether.

Queries to the Human Rights Commission and the Ministry of Justice seemed to have taken officials by surprise and went unanswered by the deadline for this column.

The eventual reaction from the government will be a very interesting measure of how far we have come in our sensitivity towards the effects of red tape on small businesses.

I wouldn't be surprised if the government quietly dropped the whole idea, rather like the authorities in Carroll's fictitious kingdom. One of his characters declares: "We now use the country itself as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."