I believe we are not incentivising our companies, and our local owner-managed companies in particular, to invest in local manufacture, assembly and training capacity.

Take the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector for example. In 2002, the key players in the ICT sector came together for a big national government-sponsored summit.

At the end of the summit they agreed to work together to identify key areas for growth and employment creation – specifically in hardware and software development.

And, most importantly, they agreed to ensure that government and business programmes support local product ion and employment through a new code of procurement that would give preference to local products.

Today, five years later, that agreement to support local content and local production has remained just that – an agreement – without being given any concrete form or reality.

The fact of the matter is that today a company that has invested in employing and training local people, invested in manufacturing or assembly equipment, invested in sourcing local components and that keeps its profits here in South Africa, can lose a tender – just like that – to a company consisting of a couple of directors and a fax machine.

Even worse is the gatekeeping evidenced when tenders specify certain brands only. It was not so long ago that our own IEC, in a major tender, included a requirement that any bidder should have at least 2% market share. That’s global market share, not local market share. Guess who that rules out!

It is against this background that I have, together with a group of like-minded South Africans, established a new initiative called South Africa First.

Under the governance of the South African Local Procurement Advocacy Trust, and with Proline (Pinnacle Holdings) and Mecer, two locally owned PC assemblers as the first members in the ICT sector, South Africa First aims to promote the idea of local content procurement preference as a powerful and necessary lever for the development of the local industry and the country.

South Africa First would like to work with government, and with companies and state-owned enterprises, to help incentivise local production.

We will be undertaking research into the best mechanisms and the benefits of doing so. And with our partners, we will be launching competitions and initiatives to encourage more local design and manufacture.

Procurement is a complex technical, legal and commercial process that can get messy and controversial. But it is vital that we balance the imperatives of value for money and black economic empowerment, with some mechanism to recognise the value of local content.

Anything else, would not put South Africa, a country with such pressing social needs, where it belongs – and that is first.

Martin Feinstein is former CEO of Proudly South African and can be contacted on martin.feinstein@telkomsa.net