Durban - The Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry has urged the government to tackle crime, grime and filth that is overrunning the Durban CBD, saying the state of the city stifles any efforts to attract investors.
CEO of the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry Palesa Phili bemoaned the state of the CBD yesterday. She said she believed this made it difficult to attract business to invest in the CBD, and worse still, even drove away those already in the CBD.
She was speaking during a business breakfast meeting held with the KwaZulu-Natal government, led by Premier Nomusa Dube-Ncube and the MEC for Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs, Siboniso Duma, and attended by business leaders.
Phili spoke on the many challenges undermining investments in the city and province.
Among the issues she highlighted were crime and grime and the criminal conduct of business forums that had been terrorising business.
She said the chamber had a proposal it wanted to put to the government that included changes to, or the tightening up of, some laws as a way to clamp down on these problems.
Phili said because of last year’s unrest, the province had become undesirable from a business point of view.
She said there were many big businesses that decided to become resilient and stay, but there were also many small and medium businesses that left the province, which was devastating.
She said as the province, they needed to get to a state where it could go and tell businesses that KZN was a safe place to invest.
“Without security, how do we encourage businesses to make sure that they invest?” she asked.
She said there had been a couple of issues that had been negatively affecting the business community in terms of growing the economy.
“The first is the issue of business forums,” she said.
She said in the townships, foreign-owned businesses were being forced to pay protection fees.
“It’s only a matter of time before these mafias come to corporations and other big businesses to request protection fees.”
She said businesses would like the government to review some policies, including the tightening of gun laws as guns procured legally were often used to intimidate them.
“The business forums should really be seen as a serious commercial crime because this is sabotage to the economy. It has really prevented a lot of projects from going ahead,” she said.
She said they would also like to see a policy review where these individuals were arrested and their bank accounts frozen.
Another problem, said Phili, was the issue of crime and grime – the inner CBD was a crime hub and had been taken over by illegal immigrants and was unattractive to investors.
“We as the business community can invest in the CBD if crime is sorted out and it’s clean. We have seen how dirty our city is and how dirty our roads are, everywhere, it is unacceptable. We get embarrassed as the business community when we have big tourism events, we cannot be driving on the freeway or roads where there is litter everywhere and nothing is maintained.
“When you drive on the M4 you can see how dirty it is, this is coming to the main hub of uMhlanga from the CBD, it is really embarrassing,” she said.
Moses Tembe of the KZN Growth Coalition concurred, saying some businesses were putting measures in place to ameliorate the issue of crime and grime.
“But having said that, the issue of security … it really is a huge concern for business right now. We are talking about investments and we would like to get international investors to put in more money, but if we can’t get the security sorted, really, it remains a huge challenge,” he said.
Tembe said when investors put in their money, they also wanted to bring their families to that country so they could see what they have done, “so you really need for every investor and tourist to feel safe in our cities. Ultimately, if we can’t do the basics right, like cleaning the streets and ensuring roads are safe, what can we do? So those basics must be attended to,” he said.
Dube-Ncube said there had been a reversal of fortunes for big municipalities such as eThekwini when it came to investment. She said previously business did not want to venture beyond the border of eThekwini because the municipality had capacity to deliver infrastructure that other municipalities did not.
“But what we are seeing now is the opposite, where people would rather go to those small municipalities because things there happen better rather than in big municipalities that seem to be a stumbling block to our development.”
Professor Irrshad Kaseeram, of the University of Zululand’s Economics Department, said the lack of cleanliness in the city drove away investment not just because the place was dirty, but because it was seen as a symptom of a deeper governance issue.
He added that the cost of doing business was also an important factor in investment. If it became too expensive to operate in a place, businesses would go elsewhere.