This article examines Zimbabwe's indigenisation legislation, points out some of its inadequacies and draws lessons from South Africa's experiences in implementing its own indigenisation legislation. Both countries have encountered challenges relating to an upsurge in unethical business conduct aimed at defeating the objectives of their black economic empowerment programmes, policies and legislation. This practice is called business fronting. However, while South Africa has succeeded in enacting a credible piece of legislation aimed at addressing this issue, Zimbabwe has yet to do so. The article points out that the failure to specifically regulate against business fronting poses the most significant threat to the attainment of the laudable aims and objectives of the indigenisation programme and related legislation. In order to avoid becoming a regulatory regime that is notorious not only for being functionally ineffective but also for tacitly permitting racketeering in reality, the article argues for the adoption of antifronting legislation in Zimbabwe using the South African legislation as a model.
This article provides a detailed analysis of the Insider Trading Act, 1998, of South Africa. While it welcomes those provisions designed to proscribe insider trading by creating offences and introducing severe sanctions, it criticizes the Act for doing little to promote the goals of corporate compensation and market efficiency. The article adopts a comparative approach and draws widely on legislative attempts in other jurisdictions to control insider trading.
Natural resources endowment is a blessing to the endowed states due to their catalytic development-driving potential. The exploitation of the endowment should result in rapid socio-economic development. However, for most developing states, the blessing of these natural resources strangely tends to turn disadvantageous; a phenomenon that has been distinctly identified in the literature as ‘the resource curse’. This paper examines that phenomenon, using Nigeria as a case study given the serious environmental, political and socio-economic challenges occasioned by the country’s exploitation of its oil and gas endowment. The paper particularly considers the impact of the statutory intervention in Nigeria to reverse the trend through the instrumentality of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Act (NEITI Act) 2007. The paper further explores what could be the most effective means of containing the said problems in light of their implications for the future of the country and its people.
Under the legal framework of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), countries have great flexibility to unilaterally adopt environmental regulations that have effect within their territories only. However, the same discretion does not apply to measures that adversely affect imports or exports. An absence of clear guidelines on how to address some of the attendant issues poses challenges to the effectiveness of a trade-environment linkage. Not surprisingly, attempts to link the environment and trade have resulted in a number of jurisprudentially significant cases in which the WTO's Panel and Appellate Body have tried to address critical questions about the Organisation's capacity to address or manage legal or quasi-legal subjects falling outside the scope of its legal framework. In this regard the Panel and Appellate Body reports in the case of United States - Measures Affecting the Production and Sale of Clove Cigarettes (US-Clove Cigarettes) have re-ignited the debate on the Organisation's existential challenge of balancing the rights of the sovereign to freely regulate matters pertaining to health or the environment within its domestic domain with the need to maintain the sanctity of the multilateral trade order. This article demonstrates that in the US-Clove Cigarettes case the WTO Panel and Appellate Body, whilst managing to successfully defend the integrity of WTO Member States' treaty commitments and the overarching importance of trade liberalisation within the organisation's policy foundations even in the context of public health-related regulations, failed to provide any substantive affirmation of the development-related challenges facing developing countries that are part of the WTO family.
regulations, failed to provide any substantive affirmation of the development-related challenges facing developing countries that are part of the WTO family.
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