Donald MacKay, director of XA International Trade Advisors in Johannesburg, is arguably the most knowledgeable outsider on the inner workings of SA’s Byzantine trade policy mechanisms.
The matrix of the International Trade Administration Commission of SA; the department of trade, industry & competition (DTIC); the National Treasury; and the SA Revenue Service (Sars) is pretty much impenetrable, but MacKay has stared at it long enough to know something is going badly wrong.
XA has just published a report describing the extent to which investigations for decisions on applications by SA employers for import duty rebates or their removal are running over the normal six months.
Some are now nearly two years old. Many are more than a year old. About R2.1bn in duties paid is the subject of complaint and possible legal action as a result of them being imposed unfairly by the DTIC and Sars. Some are for the import of products that are not even made in SA and therefore can’t be protected. This is part of the madness of central planning, of DTIC minister Ebrahim Patel’s “localisation” policies.
“The process seems to be broken at the moment,” MacKay tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge.
That would be an understatement. Patel has had to lift punitive anti-dumping duties on chicken imports because his protection of the local industry has allowed it to overcharge for local products, starving the poor of a vital source of protein. And now the minister plans to try to ban the export of scrap.
It is a popular move because it plays to the myth of infrastructure being stolen for export. But it is already almost impossible to export scrap and the last time it was banned, in 2020, the assault on our infrastructure reached a record high.
Podcasts from the Edge is a production of TimesLIVE Podcasts.
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Podcasts from the Edge
PODCAST | The system is broken
Peter Bruce talks to Donald MacKay about SA's trade policy mechanisms
Image: Freddy Mavunda
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Donald MacKay, director of XA International Trade Advisors in Johannesburg, is arguably the most knowledgeable outsider on the inner workings of SA’s Byzantine trade policy mechanisms.
The matrix of the International Trade Administration Commission of SA; the department of trade, industry & competition (DTIC); the National Treasury; and the SA Revenue Service (Sars) is pretty much impenetrable, but MacKay has stared at it long enough to know something is going badly wrong.
XA has just published a report describing the extent to which investigations for decisions on applications by SA employers for import duty rebates or their removal are running over the normal six months.
Some are now nearly two years old. Many are more than a year old. About R2.1bn in duties paid is the subject of complaint and possible legal action as a result of them being imposed unfairly by the DTIC and Sars. Some are for the import of products that are not even made in SA and therefore can’t be protected. This is part of the madness of central planning, of DTIC minister Ebrahim Patel’s “localisation” policies.
“The process seems to be broken at the moment,” MacKay tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge.
That would be an understatement. Patel has had to lift punitive anti-dumping duties on chicken imports because his protection of the local industry has allowed it to overcharge for local products, starving the poor of a vital source of protein. And now the minister plans to try to ban the export of scrap.
It is a popular move because it plays to the myth of infrastructure being stolen for export. But it is already almost impossible to export scrap and the last time it was banned, in 2020, the assault on our infrastructure reached a record high.
Podcasts from the Edge is a production of TimesLIVE Podcasts.
Subscribe for free future episodes: iono.fm | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Player.fm
Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.
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