Cry the beloved KwaZulu-Natal Midlands THERE are fewer places in the country that are more beautiful than the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. I love the entire province’s biodiversity and spectacular views, but this bit is my favourite. It is home. Driving through it always leaves me with a bittersweet taste. I love returning to this wonderful countryside, and the winding roads offer some of the most pleasurable driving. No wonder we get taken there quite a lot for car launches. Once the rolling hills and lush green have settled into my mind, the less pleasant side of the region reveals itself. Yesterday I was on a drive from the King Shaka International Airport to Pietermaritzburg, and then back into Durban – via Ozwathini and Wartburg. I have not seen some of these villages in decades. Places like Chibini are still exactly the same as I remember them. The same heavily-potholed roads, run-down schools, general absence of men of a certain age, and lack of significant economic activity outside of the sugar cane plantations. It is the same through much of the province. They are strangely caught in time. Development never seems to arrive. There are just fresh potholes over the fresh asphalt that was poured into the roads to fix old potholes. A never-ending, if hopeful Sisyphean task. The sadness really takes hold when you start talking to individual people. Let’s take a step back and consider the life of someone born in the deepest, most rural parts of the country. The most inaccessible parts of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. The kind of place where youth unemployment can easily be as high as 90%. If you are born here, there is every possibility that you will not be born into a home with a steady source of income outside of government grants. You are very likely born to a single mother. If you do eventually go to school, you may find that it has no roof, no secure fencing, no clean lavatories and certainly no motivated and committed teachers — we drove past one such school. Even if you manage to finish high school, your education is worthless. There are no jobs in the countryside. Well, none that promise anything more than a life just above indigence and peasantry. Those who cannot find sustenance on the small scraps of land (the former homelands) on which most of the people living in rural areas are crowded must eventually go to the city. Johannesburg or Durban. And so those ablebodied enough and educated enough go to the city – leaving the countryside to the illiterate, the very young and the old. There are tens of thousands of people migrating to the economic hubs of the country every year, and this just makes the problem of urban sprawl and informal settlements even worse. Solving the worst problems in our big cities actually requires more than an urban plan – we desperately need a rural development plan. The National Development Plan has a section on rural development. The most important section speaks of land tenure security. Hardly any people living in the rural areas own the land they live on. It is held by tribal authorities. This lack of private property creates a serious capitalisation problem – ironic, given that it is right there under the people’s feet. Land redistribution also needs to be sped up. You just need to drive around the countryside and see for yourself that crowding hundreds of thousands of people on tiny slivers of land is unsustainable. The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has its comprehensive rural development plan, which aims to redistribute 30% of the agricultural land, improve food security among the rural poor, create business opportunities and decongest overcrowded former homelands. This programme is not going well. Its redistribution programme, for instance, is off its own deadlines and targets by years. Perhaps even decades. It is against this particular backdrop that I raised a quizzical eyebrow at the news that a cash-strapped National Empowerment Fund funded Ndalo Luxury Ventures to the tune of R34m to open a luxury boutique store in the Hyde Park shopping centre. While I understand and appreciate the need for more black businesses in retail and consumer goods, I am struggling to see what the value proposition is, and the wisdom of putting this money into this business as opposed to elsewhere. Where are the entrepreneurial spinoffs? Will this investment do any more than channel money overseas to Oscar de la Renta, Giorgio Armani, Balenciaga, Tom Ford and Alexander McQueen? Look, I’m not terribly bright so perhaps this needs explaining to me in short sentences and small words. When I drive through these economically desolate areas, and look at the children growing there, and realise that we have effectively trapped yet another generation in a hopeless life, I wonder if this country has its empowerment priorities straight. BY SIPHO HLONGWANE
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 15:03:47 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015