Tag: accountability

Growing up in Cape Town with a mother whose life epitomised resilience and strength, I was offered an early glimpse into the different forms of leadership that many women embrace, but that are often overlooked by society.

In a first for the local financial services sector, a diverse collaborative industry work group established following the inaugural SA Market Surveillance Conference held last year, has developed a draft industry code of conduct to guide financial institutions and align with international standards to bolster market surveillance in the country.

On 27 June 2024, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) announced its enhanced Beneficial Ownership disclosures for the 2024 Filing Season. Not even 24 hours later, the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) issued a media release enforcing beneficial ownership (OB) declaration, to be able to file annual returns. This may simply be a compliance coincidence, but more likely a strategic move to eradicate non-compliance for companies, trusts, and partnerships, on all levels.

The Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000 (PAIA) is an empowering piece of legislation and allows that secretes cannot be hidden in the shadows. The matter of The Health Justice Initiative vs The Minister of Health provides insight from a regulatory point of view, not only since it has consequences for the privacy and information regime but also the procurement regime.

In a significant move poised to reshape the landscape of traditional medicine in South Africa, the Minister of Health has proposed new regulations for traditional health practitioners. These regulations, set to be implemented under the Traditional Health Practitioners Act of 2007, aim to address longstanding concerns about the legitimacy of medical certificates issued by traditional healers and bring greater clarity to businesses grappling with uncertainty in this area.

There is a rare opportunity to right a lot of South Africa’s wrongs in one go. Corruption and unemployment are two major roadblocks. Permit me to explain how they can be simultaneously addressed within the current administration. I suggest an amnesty largely on the African National Congress (ANC’s) past wrongdoing in office in return for liberalisation of labour laws. This may be for a bit further down the line.

Before the internet, businesses tended to operate in smaller areas and in a very siloed manner. Today, however, there is a global online economy, and the geographical boundaries that limited business operation areas have fallen away. The ease of access to information has become critical to successful operations, and the ability to leverage data has become a point of competitive differentiation.

Who knew that cybersecurity was not about sticking a firewall on the edges of the corporate network? Well it is, but if that’s all you’re doing, you’re already in trouble. At the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) annual cybersecurity conference, re:Inforce, held in Philadelphia this year, a constant refrain was that cybersecurity is as much about corporate culture as it is about technology.

In a South African context, ‘dignity’ is a word that is often supercharged, laden with meaning and emotion. Given our dark history where apartheid stripped whole groups of people of their dignity – and because of the prevailing gap between rich and poor, with South Africa having the highest Gini coefficient in the world – we not only have to believe in dignity, we must also strive to uphold it across all aspects of society.

Maintaining exceptional health and safety (H&S) standards is integral to the ongoing success of any project in the mining, construction, and engineering, procurement, and construction management (EPCM) industries. However, the time and expenses involved can be discouraging, leading to less effective outcomes.