The minister stressed the need for collaboration between government and business to improve infrastructure and boost tourism
South Africa is facing an “infrastructure crisis” and his department is working to fast-track projects, tackle urban decay and hundreds of derelict and hijacked buildings across the country, Minister of Public Works Dean Macpherson said this week.
He was speaking at a media briefing on a new partnership between his department, the KwaZulu-Natal public works department, the Federated Hospitality Association of South Africa (Fedhasa) and eThekwini metro, to boost tourism in the city.
Macpherson said it was generally accepted that the metro “is not where it should be”, which is why the Presidential Working Group has been set up with local businesses and city officials to confront problems that range from urban decay and crime to inadequate water, sanitation and road infrastructure.
“Infrastructure is not just a problem in this city, it’s a problem across the country. We are in an infrastructure crisis in the country. We are not spending publicly the amount of money that we should, and it is now catching up with us,” he said.
He said his department last week launched a project preparation financing bid window to provide municipalities, government departments and other entities with support for projects valued at more than R1 billion to expand infrastructure investment and accelerate economic growth and job creation.
“Tourism is a big contributor to job creation in our country and can absorb people into the formal economy, and so getting tourism right is crucial … a decline in tourism numbers has been seen [in eThekwini] and bookings are down year on year. There are several factors that contribute to that, obviously the one being around the state of beaches.”
Macpherson said 95% of beaches are open in eThekwini. “We want to make that message very, very clear that eThekwini is open. The beaches are safe, the water is safe.”
After a meeting with tourism authorities, Macpherson said his department was considering making the technical expertise of its built environment agency, Infrastructure South Africa, available to support municipalities.
“We also contemplated Blue Flag status. Between national, provincial government and local government, we’ve got to look at how we get that programme back on board, and what can we do as a department to contribute towards fixing problems that are more upstream in the courses of water, so that we can get an internationally recognised system back in place that tourists have confidence in.”
He said it was important to create awareness among people living upstream about how their behaviour affects the quality of the province’s rivers and beaches.
Hijacked buildings
Turning to problem buildings, he said that the government owns 388 buildings nationally that have been hijacked or illegally occupied and his department would work with the local government to “rectify” this.
“[W]herever you have an occupied building, whether it be in a city centre or a suburb, that contributes to urban decay and crime,” he said.
The department had recently “taken back” and secured the dilapidated Excelsior Court in Berea in Durban after it had been stripped — even of its lifts — and illegally occupied for more than a decade. Similarly, his department recently won a court order to evict homeless people living outside the Cape of Good Hope Castle, a major tourist attraction.
Macpherson said tourism operators in Ray Nkonyeni municipality on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast had highlighted difficulties in obtaining leases of government-owned property.
“There are 47 properties that we own down there on Admiralty land [a strip of land inland of the high-water mark] where the municipality owns the structures, and we own the land, and there are leases up for renewal,” he said.
Macpherson said tourism authorities had alleged that operators had been instructed to hand over 30% of their businesses to third parties to secure a lease renewal.
“It sounds like extortion, that’s what it is, that makes me hugely concerned. I’m not going to allow land that is owned by the state to be used to advance nefarious agendas,” Macpherson said.
“I want to make sure that businesses that have been trading there for a long time that employ 300 people are able to have certainty of tenure, that they’re able to build and invest in their businesses, and that we don’t allow these things to be used for political manoeuvres.”
Fedhasa national chairperson Rosemary Anderson said the industry wanted to be part of working on the issue of derelict, state-owned buildings “whereby we could look at repurposing them with our corporate members” and host NGOs in the buildings through corporate social responsibility programmes.
She said the province had not yet recovered to pre-Covid-19 levels of foreign tourist arrivals, but the department of home affairs’ project to fast-track visa applications for Indian and Chinese tourists and the implementation of a digital visa application process would help to boost arrivals.
Fedhasa KwaZulu-Natal chairperson Brett Tungay said forward bookings for December were “looking quite good”.
He said he believed that within the next 12 months there will be “huge changes” in the tourism environment because the new provincial and national government had put pressure on municipalities to deliver.
“We are seeing the slow turnaround, progress now in these municipalities,” he said.