Government commissioned Economic Assessment report mauls Ramaphosa’s 'Credit Bill'
10 September 2019
The Democratic Alliance can finally reveal that our long held view that the recently passed ‘Debt Relief Bill’ will be a devastating blow to low income South Africans, is entirely correct after the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) finally released the 112 page Socio-Economic Impact Assessment Study (SEIAS) into the Bill.
The DA maintains that the biggest winner from this Bill will be loan sharks as South Africans will now be forced into their open and waiting arms.
The SEIAS was commissioned by the DTI during the formulation of the National Credit Amendment Bill, also known as the ‘Debt Relief Bill’. This study was done to look at what the cost to the economy and the state of the Bill would be and how this would affect the credit market for low income South Africans.
In the ANC’s rush to pass the Bill before the 5th Parliament rose, they stubbornly refused to wait for the SEIAS. We now also know that President Cyril Ramaphosa chose to ignore the many red flags that the report raised and chose to sign it into law in the dead of night on 13 August 2019. It is unthinkable that President Ramaphosa ‘applied his mind’ to this report before he signed the Bill into law.