Eddie Koch
DURBAN must qualify as South Africa’s capital of paradox.
Thousands of residents celebrated a week of political crisis in the city — shootings outside the civic centre by armed marchers, threats to bomb the truth commission hearings and talk of escalating civil war over local government elections next month — by heading to the beachfront to see some of the babes from Baywatch who have arrived for an international lifesaving competition, or camping out under tropical trees at the Botanical Gardens to catch Chris de Burgh singing anti-war songs and other hits at his Beautiful Dreams concert.
Hotels were chock-a-block as hundreds of delegates poured through the airport gates to attend the Indaba, South Africa’s biggest tourism exhibition, on the morning that KwaZulu-Natal Finance Minister Senzele Mhlungu told the provincial legislature in his budget speech that the industrial region around Durban had experienced an economic growth rate higher than the rest of the country.
The statistics and the upbeat mood at the tourism expo (“it’s the biggest and busiest we’ve had so far with just under 100 delegates from all over the world”) contrasted grimly with the rings of yellow chalk on the pavement outside the centre hall which detectives left to mark the position of bodies from Saturday’s shooting, and also the agonising testimony presented at the commission in the Durban Jewish Club about how trade unionist Professor Sibankulu was murdered and mutilated in 1992.
One of the delegates from Mozambique’s tourism authority remarked on a bus drive through the city that the palm trees on the beach front and flamboyants growing in between high rise buildings made him think a little of Maputo. It would appear, however, the similarity stops there. For the city, despite being surrounded by civil war and endemic violence of the type that wracked Mozambique’s economy, appears to be going through boom times.
Across the way from the travel exhibition in the Durban CBD, construction teams are busy building one of those barometers of international business confidence: a Hilton hotel. A consortium of investors from Pacific Rim countries is pouring money and concrete into a new development on the north beach called the Pavilion Site. The Malaysian corporate giant, Renong, is bidding desperately against British capital to build the city’s version of Cape Town’s Waterfront.
Plans have been approved for a half-a-billion- rand golf course and lodge development in a dune forest at Zimbali further up the coast while construction teams are busy putting up new office blocks in nearby Umhlanga Rocks and Ballito Bay. The provincial government had approved R25-million to upgrade the Durban International Airport as a short-term measure before construction of a new facility for jumbos begins at La Mercy on the North Coast.
Official statistics show that the finance minister was probably close to the truth in his budget speech. Economic vibrancy in the city centre is apparently reflected in the rest of the economy. Official statistics show the KwaZulu-Natal Central Coastal Area, the industrial hub of the province, grew at a rate of 2,69% — higher than the national average of 2%. Central Statistical Services figures show the province attracted a large chunk of new investment in the country: a 0,1% growth per annum compared to minus 0,1% for the country as a whole.
Out at sea, large freighters queue up on the horizon. Plans are afoot to expand the harbour, to the chagrin of environmental groups who are worried about the way this will impact on the already strained ecology of the Umgeni estuary. Engen is expanding its refinery at the industrial complex surrounding the harbour while Toyota has just announced it will upgrade its car manufacturing plant.
What explains this apparent breach of a simple economic lesson that political violence scares off foreign investment and economic growth?
The obvious reason is that, except for Saturday’s violence in the city centre, the trauma of KwaZulu-Natal’s political violence is mainly confined to the province’s rural areas. The low-intensity civil war has created about half-a-million internal refugees in a province of nine million people. Many of them can be seen sleeping under plastic bags on the streets or begging to wash your car on the promenade. But mostly these people keep their presence, and their stories of extraordinary pain, to themselves. The crime rate has jumped a little but it is nowhere near the level of Gauteng or the Cape Peninsula.
“It is an anomaly,” says John Bryce, director of the Durban Chamber of Commerce. “But basically what we are seeing is the decline of the gold-mining industry in Gauteng and a revival of the manufacturing sector which is attracted to Durban and the province by its excellent port facilities and a relative abundance of fresh water in rivers, the shortage of which is a real constraint on the Highveld.
“The irony is that there is mostly a normal state of affairs. Life on the streets of the city is not tense despite the violence. Even if you go into the city hall (where the weekend shootings took place) you will find ANC and IFP councillors joking with each other and teasing each other,” says Gary Cullen, regional director of the National Business Initiative.
He believes the province’s businessmen have become highly pragmatic by adapting to the violence so they can take advantage of the province’s other economic attractions. “There are a couple of business leaders who support the provincial government’s federalist agenda and are opposed to central government hegemony. but generally business sees the violence as a spat between rival power groups, and there is a general feeling that it is the politicans who must get their act together.”
There are some countervailing winds though. This week President Nelson Mandela was in Maputo to support the expansion of that city’s harbour and endorse Transport Minister Mac Maharaj’s ambitious transport corridor to link Gauteng industry to its expanded export facilities. The development poses no immediate threat to Durban and Richard’s Bay’s ability to handle 80% of the country’s harbour traffic, mainly because Maputo’s port is too silted and shallow to take big containerised cargo ships.
But sources in the trade and industry ministry say the corridor is being pushed as an insurance policy against the prospect of a secessionist province, and there are signs that central government is encouraging new capital investment projects in areas outside KwaZulu-Natal. Alusaf, for example, is looking at a major new smelter in Maputo instead of Richards Bay where it already has a state-of- the-art aluminium plant.
“There is more economic activity in KwaZulu- Natal than any other part of the country,” says Bryce. “But the violence and political instability here must be unsettling to business. If I were sitting in London with a bit of money to invest and like KwaZulu-Natal because of its traditional ties with England I would probably wait and see what happens here. It is possibly what people are doing.”
While there is no prospect of this port city being afflicted by the Maputo syndrome, business people are concerned that the escalating violence will eventually stall the mini-boom that Durban is currently experiencing in the face of the province’s travails.
ENDS