Peter Dickson
Port Elizabeth, gateway to one of South Africa’s most impoverished regions, is gearing up for an economic miracle that could ironically put immense pressure on the city as the homeless and jobless compete for living space.
A decade ago 30 000 people poured into Saldanha and set up informal settlements, built on the hope of a job at a single new steel factory.
The Coega industrial development zone – three steel factories and a deep-water port – will make up Port Elizabeth’s long-awaited spin-off of South Africa’s defence procurement programme. Planned in the centre of a region with a 49% unemployment rate, it has been hailed by the Bisho government as “the economic salvation of the Eastern Cape”. The R1,5- billion project is expected to create between 10 000 and 15 000 jobs in a three-year construction phase scheduled to start in the last quarter of this year.
Eastern Cape Premier Makhenkesi Stofile said Coega will “start the economic regeneration of our historically underdeveloped province”.
With an expected R10-billion boost for the provincial economy, provincial MEC for Economic Affairs Enoch Godongwana said the project, which will also provide storage and handling facilities for manganese, coal, iron ore and liquid fuels, is vital to meeting “the macro-economic objectives of national government which are centred on job creation”.
Thousands of jobless rural Eastern Cape families, who are pouring into the city’s overcrowded townships every month, clearly agree with Stofile and Godongwana.
Organised groups of land invaders are already giving the city a headache by squatting on land destined for new housing developments once plots have been serviced in a costly de-densification programme. These problems are likely to increase later this year once the administrative complexities of the new Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage/Despatch metropole become a reality.
Coega will bring in thousands more thanks to advance publicity. In a stark illustration of the region’s desperate job market, more than 23 000 people last month flocked to the Uitenhage gates of Volkswagen South Africa after 1 300 workers were fired, while scores were trampled and injured when thousands of job seekers stampeded through the East London city centre in search of copies of a local newspaper adverti-sing 700 jobs at the city’s DaimlerChrysler plant.
Coega communications manager Raymond Hartle said: “Wherever possible you want to avoid a sharp influx of people from the rural areas,” adding that “it makes absolutely no sense for people suddenly to leave Ugie or Tsolo or Graaff-Reinet and come to Coega”.
For those on the breadline, the long road to Port Elizabeth in search of daily survival makes perfect sense – but it could breed bitter competition with locals over jobs and living space.
Hartle said Coega must benefit all of the Eastern Cape’s people as it is “in nobody’s interest to have an oasis of development at Coega in a vast desert of underdevelopment”, and it must create work and tourism opportunities nationwide.
Locals will get first option. Hartle said: “Coe-ga must have a very direct, positive impact on the people of this metropole, because something must be done to correct the underdevelopment and high unemployment levels evident here as compared to other metropolitan areas.”
Port Elizabeth town clerk and chief executive officer Graham Richards said the Coega project team already has a “substantive” database of skilled locals who will get preference and the Eastcape Training Centre-aided process is “well advanced”.
Richards agrees that “we are seeing an increase in the flow of people to the city, but I don’t believe we have any Saldanha-type influx as yet. That may very well occur here and we will have to seriously start planning for that.”
The city’s town planners already have a good idea of possible scenarios. Informal settlements have mushroomed throughout the city as drought, mine retrenchments and overstretched welfare grants bring people to the town at an estimated 2 000- plus each month.
Last week, opposite the city’s “Millionaire’s Row” in Kragga Kamma, shack-dwellers felled 20m-high trees and built burning barricades in fierce resistance to being removed to nearby Greenbushes, as a helicopter hovered overhead and police and troops fired rubber bullets and stun grenades. Some of the squatters threatened Zimbabwe-style land invasions in heated arguments with police and tried to set police vans alight with burning rags jammed into petrol tanks. First asked to move on in December and then subject to a court order as neighbours complained of rampant theft, the squatters agreed to move after two days of negotiations.
Police said they had “not been prepared for such a [violent] reaction from the squatters”. In a city where serviced land is fast running out and where rates and service payment arrears topped R420-million this month, such reactions could become commonplace once work on Coega begins.