Like Mafia-type organisations around the world, the “Boere-mafia” of Nelspruit operate with stealth — amassing influence and wealth without leaving many footprints.
But while the Italian mob apparently like to use cement to encase their opponents’ feet before throwing them into rivers, the Nelspruit bosses tend to use concrete to smother people’s lives — and then they dry up the rivers.
Industrial and residential development is booming in the Mpumalanga capital. Insider cliques with influence in the local council are making a lot of money, and you can be sure that most of them have connections with the Boeremafia — with the occasional Sithole thrown in to reflect the changing times.
The mafia earned the soubriquet because for years they have shaped and profited from the development of the capital city. Most of them are developers, architects and builders, but they tend to keep a closed network.
My personal experience has given me an inkling of how the system works. Five years ago I bought a stand in a small private game reserve on the fringes of Nelspruit. It combines the best of both worlds: Lowveld bush and the pizza and video shops are a 10-minute drive away.
Each resident on the 120ha reserve owns 2ha. They can only develop a maximum of 3 000m2 and the rest is left as open commonage for buck and small wildlife to roam between the houses. It’s an innovative model, with a relatively light environmental footprint.
The reserve was conceptualised and developed by one of the main mafiosi, so not all their ideas are bad. But then along came a Van with a Plan developing a high-density residential area around some of the borders of the reserve.
Local legend has it that he was a member of the local council when he concluded an agreement to pay for roads and infrastructure in the area, in exchange for the opportunity to develop and sell a face-brick monstrosity.
Now he has suburbanites buying up tiny townhouses that comprise wall-to-wall face brick and red tiles. The bush has been bulldozed, koppies blasted and sewers overflow into the stream that runs through the development and into a nearby wetland.
Premium prices are paid for those properties that abut our reserve and provide a view of the magnificent trees and wildlife destroyed by the townhouses. Those owners living inside the reserve unlucky enough to have bought on the edges of the reserve now look out on to high-density suburbia.
It’s not a matter of economics, but rather greed and clay feet. There are several small private reserves and eco-estates dotted around Nelspruit, and their developers have all made lots of money out of them. They occur in zones supposedly earmarked for rural residential development — what made the council change its mind and sanction suburban development in these areas?
If you believe the classic Italian mob movies, you’ll know that one of the reasons why an insider may end up “swimming” with cement shoes is if he turns traitor and breaks the code of silence. They also don’t like outsiders trying to break the code.
In Nelspruit, outsiders who try to muscle in on Boeremafia turf are unlikely to end up at the bottom of a lake, but they are likely to get bogged down in red tape.
A Pretoria developer last year announced his intention to establish another high-density “township”, comprising 1 000 units and a retirement village on 340ha, on another border of our reserve. He has come up against stiff opposition from all quarters, and it will take him a long time and cost him a whack of money to get his application through the council.
Nelspruit is one of the cities identified for the development of a soccer stadium for the 2010 World Soccer Cup. The national government has allocated hundreds of millions of rand for the project, and tenders have been submitted to the local council for the design and construction of the stadium. It will be interesting to see whether the job goes to a local or outside consortium.
When it comes to elections, the African National Congress wins Nelspruit hands-down — mainly because the majority of votes comes from several large townships sprawled on the perimeters of the city in the giant Mbombela municipality. But in the city centre, the Freedom Front Plus hangs up its posters with confidence: with the Boeremafia in control, it knows it can hang on to a toehold.