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Cape Town – South Africa needs to support its local industries if it wants to grow the economy and create jobs, according to Proudly South African director Leslie Sedibe.
Sedibe said the continued export of unprocessed raw materials was problematic.
“We are exporting South African jobs,” he said.
Sedibe said that when goods came back SA consumers ended up paying more.
Sedibe was speaking at the Proudly South African conference hosted by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Tuesday.
According to Sedibe South African good were competing against goods from other countries which were “highly incentivised”.
“We need to protect our local industries ... we need to buy back South Africa,” he said.
Sedibe said that in the run up to the 2016 local elections South Africa needed to “respect the dignity of labour”.
“We want to ensure that the theme is buying local,” he said.
Sedibe gave the conference several examples of how the US government protected its local industries after the great depression of the 1920s.
Cosatu used the event to mobilise shop stewards to establish “workplace procurement committees” to drive the Department of Economic Development’s “Local Procurement Accord”.
The accord provided a framework for the implementation of procurement from local manufacturers in SA.
All company purchases of “raw materials, overalls, machinery” were to be sourced from local manufacturers, Cosatu instructed its shop stewards.
