Systems must be put in place to ensure that bureaucracy does not halt much-needed economic investment. One system that could be considered is for, say, exploration and mining licence applications to have a fixed deadline of, for example, 120 days.
Should approval not be granted in that time, the applications should be deemed to be correct and applicants allowed to go ahead with their investments. Should the applications later be found wanting, the system should have a built-in provision that allows government to review such applications and to haul errant investors over the coals.
In the main, investors and their legal advisers go all out to conform to the letter of the law, and to have fully compliant applications piling up in a government official’s drawer is simply no longer on. This country’s unemployment level is simply too high to allow a lack of government capacity to halt valuable job-creating investment.