EDITORIAL: Racing towards a provincial train wreck

The historian CW de Kiewiet famously observed that South Africa advances through “political disasters and economic windfalls”.

At this point, that’s almost wishful thinking. We have been rather short in recent years of economic windfalls, and political disaster is not so much an individual event as a permanent condition.

Nowhere is this more evident than in KwaZulu-Natal. This is a province reliant on a number of key economic pillars, three of which — its ports, its tourism industry and its sugar fields — are wobbling ominously.

Corrupt and incompetent government administration — at national, provincial and municipal level — has sabotaged economic activity across one of South Africa’s most richly endowed regions. Add the natural disaster of severe flooding in April this year, and the political and security emergency of the July 2021 riots, and you begin to wonder if recovery is possible.

Even the private sector has let the side down, with the failure of the former blue-chip sugar giant Tongaat Hulett. It has been put into business rescue with debt 10 times its market value, after an accounting scandal second only to Steinhoff in scale.

Tongaat is one of the biggest employers in KZN, and a major player in an industry that is the world’s 11th-biggest exporter of sugar. There are 14 sugar mills in KZN, serving 20,700 small-scale and 1,100 large-scale growers. And if Tongaat isn’t saved, it’s not a given that rivals will step in and take up the slack, given the availability of sugar imports.

Yet business failures, Covid, floods and riots aside, years of provincial and parastatal mismanagement were already beginning to take their toll. 

Take Durban’s port. According to the World Bank’s container ports performance index for 2020, Durban was placed stone last of 351 ports. That humiliating result was nothing less than the result of chronic inefficiency born of years of bad management by Transnet.

Nor can the widespread collapse of the province’s sewage treatment works be blamed entirely on the April floods. Neglect of its infrastructure and poor maintenance has been a persistent problem, worsened by an explosion in corruption in the awarding of contracts.

The result is that the tourist magnets of some the world’s greatest beaches have been rendered useless, thanks to sky-high E. coli levels and dangerous pollution.

With days to go before the tourist season kicks off in earnest, there’s no sign that the eThekwini municipality, the province or even national government have anything close to an actual plan to fix the sewerage system. 

Luckily, KZN agriculture is far more than sugar. Other important sectors are beef, pork, grains, dairy, poultry, vegetables, macadamia nuts, bananas and timber.

But even in those areas life is harder than ever. Faced with rampant crime, impassable roads and destroyed bridges, farmers have linked up with their workers and local communities to fix what the government cannot, or will not. 

They have repaired roads and bridges, maintained dams and infrastructure and hired hundreds of skilled supervisors and labourers.

This self-sufficiency is laudable, but it’s an unacceptable indictment of a rapacious and complacent government that is content to sit back and tax its citizenry while failing to honour the quid pro quo of providing services.

And worse: those in other parts of the country fear that it’s a foretaste of what lies in wait for them, unless there is a change in their political leadership.