South Africa's three large metropolitan chambers of commerce and industry in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban have agreed to form a new association, Metrocham, to tackle common problems, Business Report said last week.
A draft constitution has been accepted by the three member cities, the report said.
Louis Steenkamp, outgoing president of the Cape Town regional chamber, said Metrocham would deal effectively with issues of specific importance to big metropolitan areas.
“We are confident Metrocham will serve our members' interests and give impetus to the national debate on how to transform and grow South Africa's economy to the benefit of all," Steenkamp is quoted as saying at chamber’s annual general meeting.
He said the Cape Town chamber was the largest of the three, with more than 4 600 members. "More significantly, about 30 percent of new members are black."
According to the newspaper, Steenkamp said that this growing support and membership from all sections of the community was a clear indication that the chamber was “a representative voice of business for all”.
He said the challenges for the chamber’s black economic empowerment initiatives included accreditation; the standardisation of BEE scorecards; and “turning around the growing trend towards BEE being only about equity and ownership instead of embracing the other important aspects like training, management, procurement, corporate social investment and enterprise development”.
As the Western Cape was the first region to have a regional electricity distributor to take over the job done by Eskom and the municipalities, it was becoming “the pioneer for the country”, Steenkamp is reported as saying.
He highlighted the chaos and high costs incurred by power failures.
“Just how the business model will satisfy the concerns of both consumers and municipalities remains to be seen. What is of the very greatest importance to industry, commerce and residents is that reliability of the supply is maintained,” Steenkamp is quoted as saying.
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