More laws than ever. But we don’t feel safe and can’t get growth

A bookkeeper I know runs a small practice on the East Rand. Her clients are the businesses that
quietly hold this country together: a panel-beater, two spaza shops, a small construction outfit that
lays kerbs for the municipality. She spends more of her week helping them survive compliance than
helping them grow. Registrations. Returns. Re-registrations. The paperwork multiplies. The businesses
do not. She is not unusual. She is the median reality of the South African economy.

Two numbers that should not sit together

Between 1960 and 1980, with somewhere between 75 and 225 Acts of Parliament on the books, South
Africa grew its economy by an average of 4.6% a year. Between 2010 and 2024, with more than
620 Acts in force, we managed 1.1%. We now carry 11 times more legislation than in 1960.
And the average South African is poorer, per person, than they were in 2013.

I know the correlation does not mean causation and I will not pretend otherwise. But a pattern this
stark demands a question and it is not the one we usually ask. The answer is not fewer laws; South Africa needs many of them. It is laws with someone, at last, accountable for what they cost in growth.

We chose safety over growth and got neither

We tend to assume the job is to write better, safer law. So we have built one of the most sophisticated
regulatory architectures on the continent: National Treasury, South African Revenue Service, Financial Intelligence Centre, Independent Regulatory Board for Auditors, an independent auditor-general, a free press and a working Constitution. The entire machine was designed to keep us safe: from fraud, from instability and from abuse.

It did not even do that. Masterbond, Steinhoff and the Gupta-era state capture each happened in full
view of the rules, the regulators and the auditors meant to prevent them. Piling on legislation did not
buy us protection. The statute book grew elevenfold and the largest frauds in our history walked
straight through it.

And it certainly did not buy us growth. Which leaves the most uncomfortable conclusion of all: more
law gave us neither the safety it promised nor the growth we needed. We bolted brake onto brake
and the car still crashed. It never once accelerated.

The sheer volume of regulation is simply not the same thing as either outcome. The reason is in the wiring. A regulator whose mandate is calibrated only to the public interest produces public-interest
compliance: paperwork, returns and tick-boxes. That is what we asked of it, so that is what it gives us.
Compliance is not the same as catching the next Steinhoff and it is certainly not the same as helping
a business grow. Not from malice. From mandate.

Two damaged histories, two responses

Consider China. By 1979 it was emerging from the catastrophe of Mao, the deadliest famine in human
history and then the Cultural Revolution and was one of the poorest countries on earth. South Africa
was, on paper, far richer per head, though that figure flatters us: it rests on apartheid-era accounts
that wrote the black homelands out of the statistics.

This is not a contest over whose past was cleaner. Neither was: one country was scarred by Maoism, the other by apartheid. It is a comparison of what each chose to do next.

China made one decision we never fully made: growth would be the organising goal and every
official would be measured against it. It did not import a finished rulebook; it experimented, “crossing
the river by feeling the stones”, adapting policy to what worked. The political scientist Yuen
Yuen Ang calls this “directed improvisation”.

Within a generation, China lifted 800 million people out of poverty. South Africa, at its own turning point in 1994, reached instead for the rulebook, adopting international standards wholesale, often designed for economies nothing like ours, and measuring success by whether we complied with them rather than whether they grew anything. Over the same period our poverty headcount rose.

I am not asking us to copy China’s politics and I am not romanticising either past. I am asking us to
borrow one principle every accountant knows: you get what you measure. Measure compliance and you get compliance. Measure growth and, over time, you might get growth.

Britain has shown how

This is not radical and it has been done inside a constitutional democracy. In 2015, the United Kingdom enacted a Growth Duty, requiring every regulator to have regard to economic growth and in 2024 it published a framework making them report on it annually.

This month the Chartered Institute for Business Accountants put a proposal before the Presidency and Cabinet to do the same here: a South African Growth Duty. In plain terms, our financial and professional regulators, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, the Reserve Bank, the auditing regulator, the companies office, the tax authority and the qualifications authority, the human rights commission, and all other agencies, SOCs and commissions would be required to treat GDP growth and employment as objectives co-equal to the public interest and to report against that duty every year.

This is not deregulation

Let me be precise about what this is not. It is not a bonfire of the rules and it is not a licence to cut
corners on safety. It is proportionality made statutory. It means the full weight of regulation designed
for a JSE-listed company stops landing, unchanged, on a three-person enterprise in Katlehong. It
means my bookkeeper’s construction client spends less of her fee surviving the state and more of it
building the country. The brakes stay. We are simply admitting that the car also needs to move.

Where the government wants to go

The good news is that this fits exactly where the government says it is headed. Operation Vulindlela is
built on removing the binding constraints to growth. In February, the finance minister called steady
structural reform “the bedrock of a prosperous and more inclusive South Africa.” A Growth Duty is simply the instrument that makes that sentence permanent, a standing test applied to every regulator, every year, not a single line in a single Budget.

A promise we can keep

There is a deeper reason to act. Every right in our Constitution rests on an economic precondition.
The right to water needs infrastructure. The right to education needs schools. The right to dignity
needs a person who can afford to feed a family. A right you cannot afford to exercise is not a right. It
is a promise.

South Africa can keep its promises. But only if growth stops being something we hope for and
becomes something we measure. We have spent sixty-five years proving that more law, by itself, does
not make a country richer, or even safer. It is time we asked our institutions a different question, not
only “did everyone follow the rules?” but “did the business survive, and did the country grow?”
The accountants who sit inside those businesses already know the answer. It is time the state started
asking.

Nicolaas van Wyk is the CEO of Chartered Institute for Business Accountants

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