The high-level Ministerial committee that has been established to reduce the red tape around job- and growth-generating capital projects would probably focus its attention on mega-scale investments, Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies told members of SwissCham Southern Africa on Tuesday.

But he also stressed that the initiative was designed to send a signal to other spheres of government that the administration was keen to unblock regulatory and other impediments to private sector projects that could bring “lifeblood of our economy” and could be key to rebuilding the productive sectors of agriculture and mining, but especially the embattled manufacturing sector.

The committee, which received its mandate from the mid-year Cabinet lekgotla, would be made up of Davies, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel.

It had been charged with “unblocking pipelines around investments” by identifying the constraints to the implementation of the investment, whether these were regulatory or financial.

Patel reported recently that the committee had identified a range of private sector projects that were being held up by administrative decisions regarding licences, quotas or planning permissions. He added that the Ministerial committee would seek to alleviate these constraints, as had been done recently for a job-rich agroprocessing investment being pursued by a Singaporean investor.

It would also interrogate ways to unlock projects that were being constrained by the absence of public infrastructure, as was the case with rail in the Limpopo province, the absence of which was undermining coal mining investments.

“In scanning the economy, we have identified a number of such examples that, we think with focused and purposeful action by government can help boost investment levels by the private sector,” Patel said.

Davies highlighted the stalled biofuels project pipeline as another example, noting that these projects had not been implemented owing to the absence of blending rules, as well as their difficulty in accessing water licences and environmental approvals.

“We want to send a message right the way through government that we need to have a new mentality of unblocking unnecessary blockages and unnecessary red tape,” Davies explained.

He said that the idea was to shorten the decision-making cycle, as well as to assess the appropriateness of a number of proposed projects, some of which had remained dormant for decades.

However, he stressed that that would not exempt such projects from securing necessary environmental and planning approvals. However, where duplicate information was being sought, or regulations were inappropriate, actions would be taken to “rationalise” the process.

It is understood that Sasol’s proposed coal-to-liquids investment, dubbed Project Mafutha, would be interrogated, as well as key State-owned enterprises developments, such as additional rail capacity to transport coal for domestic and export markets from the Limpopo province. It was also likely that Project Mthombo, an oil refinery being promoted by PetroSA, would come under review.

“Some of this involves us having to take a decision about whether we are going to pursue the project at all. We have got a number of these sitting around – projects that have been talked about for years and years and year.”

The committee would also attempt to assess the projects rationally and through the prism of the national interest, rather than being swayed by how well the project was being promoted or lobbied.

“As government we have identified that we need to improve, quite significantly, the way in which we interact and the way in with we take decisions on a number of these matters,” Davies concluded.