SA Affordable Housing September / October 2020 | Page 17

PROFILE
SAPMA’s new executive
director takes reins at a
critical juncture
By Eamonn Ryan
Tara Benn has been appointed Executive Director of the SA Paint
Manufacturing Association (SAPMA) in succession to Deryck Spence
who has retired after 11 years in this position.
Benn, who joined SAPMA in 2016, was the association’s
Training and Administration Manager before assuming
the post of SAPMA Assistant Executive Director last
year. She previously had a diversified career involving staff
recruitment, service at a leading international accounting firm
and, in Botswana, was part of a project management company
and also carried out educational duties early in her career.
Benn was identified by her predecessor Spence, who
mentored and coached her into the role over the preceding
year, introducing her to industry and government leaders. She
took up the SAPMA reins at a critical time.
“Post-Covid-19, the coatings sector is getting to grips with
all the new protocols required of all businesses. During the first
five weeks of lockdown, as an organisation we were lobbying
government to open the coatings sector so that people could
at least renovate while at home. We then found many paint
contractors could not go back to work, and so we lobbied for
them to open up earlier. I became part of a task team with the
Master Builders’ Association to get construction opened, so
contractors could go back to work (as initially they were only
supposed to return to work in level two).
“Even now, the industry is still finding its feet in terms
of what they can and cannot do. The DTI is keen to get local
manufacturing up and running as rapidly as possible, and to
encourage support of local manufacturing,” says Benn.
One of the barriers to talking with a single coatings voice
during the lockdown, says Benn, proved to be the lack of
comprehensive statistics for the industry, “which DTI wants in
order to gauge the significance and stature of our industry”. For
competitive reasons, many manufacturers are reluctant to share
statistics, as a result of which the most recent (incomplete)
statistics are for the year 2017.
“DTI was saying to us, ‘if you want to open up as a sector,
prove to us you’re valuable enough’. One of the issues deterring
companies from sharing information was its confidentiality: not
even having the data collated and managed by the association’s
auditors was deemed acceptable.”
SAPMA
Tara Benn, executive director of the SA Paint Manufacturing
Association (SAPMA).
Training remains a priority, and with her having previously
been SAPMA’s Training Manager, this play to Benn’s strengths. A
challenge is that there is no paint qualification in South Africa,
having been scrapped some years ago. “We’re busy redefining
and remodelling that now and have started a process with
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