23 Oct 2013

Privatisation is an essential reform that has opportunities to promote citizen participation and empowerment.

The acting chief executive officer of the Public Enterprises Evaluation and Privatisation Agency (PEEPA), Ms Tiny Diswai-Moremi,said this when updating federations of trade unions on how PEEPA was doing in terms of implementing privatisation projects.

Ms Diswai-Moremi said privatisation facilitated the private sector participation in the economy and ensured that the private sector grew bigger and played a more meaningful role in the economy.

“Privatisation can promote economic diversification away from the current dependence on government and diamonds. Government can focus on its policy development and regulation responsibilities, as opposed to focusing on running businesses because government is not a business man. Let the business man run business.”

She said through privatisation, the limited financial resources might be channeled to other pressing national needs as opposed to channeling them to running businesses that were not necessarily efficient. She added that through privatisation, there would also be improved service delivery to the public, as the private sector was known to be more innovative than government.

She also said the Privatisation Master Plan was approved by the government in 2005 and had been reviewed to see how far it had been implemented and to identify services and public enterprises that were suitable for privatization between 2013 and 2018.

Ms Diswai-Moremi explained that in developing the plan, the aim was to align the privatization programme to government’s National Development Plan 10, Vision 2016 and the BIAC Excellence Strategy that the government embarked on.

Another objective, she said, was to find a way to coordinate and focus the privatisation programme to ensure that it was effectively implemented and ensure that there was one focal area where privatisation was being implemented from.

The focal area is PEEPA. She said one of the challenges of privatization was that it had many stakeholders, most of whom had conflicting interests and conflicting agendas. However, PEEPA exists to balance and manage the expectations and interests of the stakeholders. ENDS