Dear DM168 reader,
On Thursday I was back in my old stomping ground of Nelson Mandela Bay. This is the place where I was first afforded the opportunity to be an editor – of the local Herald and now defunct Weekend Post newspapers from 2010 to 2015. It’s a place that will always be ingrained in my heart because it is the birthplace of our beloved youngest son, who we adopted 13 years ago while living there.
The Bay is a place of immense natural beauty, from the Summerstrand promenade and pier to the wild, frothing ocean of Seaview and the horses cantering on the side roads of Mount Pleasant. While the Cape Peninsula was being hammered by winds and rain, the Bay was sunny, and the ocean as calm and still as an inland pond, with swimmers and surfers catching the waves in the distance.
It is also a place of immense poverty, inner-city decay and crime. Gangsterism and unemployment are rife in the northern areas of Helenvale and Schauderville, in New Brighton, Gqeberha and Motherwell – where the majority of the metro’s citizens reside.
Despite this typically South African schism between beauty and grime, poverty and paradise, the one thing that I learnt from living in the Bay is the spirit of can-do.
I saw it in the aunties from Helenvale who took out their brooms and kept the streets clean. I saw it in unemployment ravaged Motherwell where community members stood in their streets to prevent xenophobic thugs trying to attack and loot Somali shops. I also saw it evident on Thursday morning at a Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber breakfast.
Three years ago former General Motors communications manager for Africa, Denise van Huyssteen, took over as CEO of the chamber and started a can-do revolution.
Van Huyssteen, who has come full circle after starting her working career as an intern at what was then known as the Port Elizabeth Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry, knows what riding a storm of adversity is after seeing through the awful process of General Motors leaving the Bay and South Africa, with the consequent pain of job losses.
Together with chamber vice-president Kelvin Naidoo, manufacturing and technical executive at AutoX, a leading South African automotive lead‑acid battery manufacturer, and a steadily increasing stream of volunteers from various business sectors in the Bay, the chamber has adopted an action woman and action man approach to get local business to retain and attract investment and jobs. How are they doing this? A giant spider web mind map of squiggles on her whiteboard gives insight into Van Huyssteen’s vision. They have divvied up the Bay into 11 geographic clusters where neighbouring businesses, which before might never have even spoken to one another, work together to solve shared challenges.
Each cluster adopts a leak, a power station, a school and works with the relevant state sector to make sure the infrastructure is fixed and functional.
As Van Huyssteen told us, by working with the municipality, businesses have helped save more than 1.6 million litres of treated water per day by repairing household leaks in low-income communities.
Businesses have also adopted 19 substations in industrial areas across the metro to provide additional security to guard against cable theft and vandalism, which disrupts their production as well as the lives of surrounding communities.
This work has nothing to do with politics but everything to do with visionary can-do leadership. This is the same sort of leadership that can be seen in action through the Jozi My Jozi movement initiated by entrepreneur and Nando’s cofounder Robby Brozin and IQbusiness CEO Adam Craker. Now run by acting CEO Bea Swanepoel, another dynamic woman leader seconded by Anglo American, Jozi my Jozi is making great strides in turning around the inner city of our country's biggest metro. Working with the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department, the South African Police Service, Pikitup, Joburg City Parks and Zoo, the Johannesburg Roads Agency, Gauteng Crime Prevention Wardens, various private companies, several Joburg business partners and ordinary can-do resident volunteers, Jozi My Jozi has embarked on a cleanup and law-enforcement campaign to rejuvenate the inner city.
Activities range from clearing illegal dumping sites and unblocking stormwater channels to reinstating road markings and getting engineers to conduct structural assessments of bridges.
There are great similarities between the two urban movements. Both cities have been bedevilled by bad politics. Coalition governments and mayoral and municipal changes have led to leadership vacuums. Since I left Nelson Mandela Bay in 2016, the city has had seven different mayors and 13 different municipal managers. Johannesburg, our country’s megalopolis, has had seven mayors. Bad politics with bad self-serving leadership only interested in power, point-scoring and salary-taking leads to no and poor service delivery, and cities falling apart at the seams.
Many argue that the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber, Jozi My Jozi and Gift of the Givers are doing the work that local and provincial governments and state-owned enterprises should be doing. These critics are not wrong. But if it were not for the visible, action-oriented, collaborative leadership of these amazing and visionary South Africans, we would be stuck in a pile of stagnating rubbish left by the incompetent idiots that political parties put in charge. And we would collapse as a society.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has realised that our problems need to be fixed through partnerships with those who have the skills, hence the workstreams created on a national level with business. We can only hope that his GNU works as a collaborative team, harnessing the skills of the right people for the common good of all South Africans, like the local businesses and volunteers in Nelson Mandela Bay and Jozi are doing. This has to start with employing competent, experienced and fit for the job civil servants headed up by servant leaders in every government department .
There are some among us who hanker after the white power days of pre-1994 and believe that South Africa has fallen apart because of incompetent black leadership. Please do not ever assume that I or indeed the teams at Nelson Mandela Bay or Jozi My Jozi think the right skills are only “white” skills. We need all hands on deck to fix our country. And we have a cornucopia of hardworking, educated, trained black talent with skills and leadership acumen who have been excluded from contributing because they are not politically connected or because they refuse to be part of the cadre deployment gravy train. If the GNU is serious about getting us back on track, the time for true anti-racist patriots to shine is now.
Please send your thoughts about this to heather@dailymaverick.co.za and I will consider publishing them on our readers’ page.
In this week’s DM168 lead story, available from today at all retail outlets and to Daily Maverick insiders as an e-edition every Sunday morning, our newsletter editor, John Stupart, explains to new Defence and Military Veterans Minister Angie Motshekga what the South African National Defence Force needs in order to, well, defend South Africa. In fact, we have quite an explosive issue, with journalists Nonkululeko Njilo and Bheki Simelane spending time in the North West town of Orkney, where four soldiers died under suspicious circumstances, as well as Greg Ardé’s article on the two homemade bombs found at a mosque in Kenneth Kaunda Road in Durban this week. Support our journalists by treating yourself to our informative and fun weekly read.
Yours in defence of truth,
Heather
This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.