Sol Kerzner’s grim Wild Coast legacy
Red tape, infighting and hidden agendas continue to snarl up a land claim that could unlock wealth on the Wild Coast and serve as a model for restitution. Meanwhile, land anger burns from below
In 1992 Sun International signed a remarkable document with the Transkei government. It granted the hotel and casino group the exclusive right to use 640ha of some of the most spectacular seafront real estate in the world for the princely sum of R2,500 a month. The document was an addendum to a 50-year lease that former Transkei ruler Kaiser Matanzima had signed more than a decade earlier with Holiday Inn, which built a luxury resort on the land. Matanzima’s lease, which stipulated that his government would "remove from the leased property all existing farmers and inhabitants", contained no escalation clause. It also committed the former apartheid homeland to compensate the group for improvements — today worth an estimated R1.2bn — when the lease expired. By 1992 hotel magnate Sol Kerzner had channelled R2m into Transkei Prime Minister George Matanzima’s pocket for exclusive gambling rights in the homeland. Matanzima later went to jail for receiving a bribe, and a corruption case wa...
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