IN ITS struggle to overcome years of municipal crises and infrastructural decay, the business community of Pietermaritzburg is proving the power of business unity and community collaboration.
Fed up by crippling power outages, the lack of maintenance, vandalism and theft of infrastructure of the Msunduzi municipality, the Pietermaritzburg & Midlands Chamber of Business is spearheading initiatives to turn the situation around.
Mel Veness, CEO of the PMCB, says a six-month long security project to counter of the rampant theft of electricity cables in Plessislaer yielded remarkable results. Businesses in the area paid collectively to set up a private security team which collaborated with the police and municipal law enforcement.
The project nabbed all sorts of criminals, from power thieves who connect illegally to the grid to a gang who had a scale fitted to the back of a bakkie in order to weight stolen copper on the spot. “We drove down the number of incidence to almost zero, but it pushed the problem to adjacent areas,” says Mel.
The Chamber has now proposed a plan to scale up the project to cover the whole city, as well as a second public-private partnership in which the chamber proposes to fix a crucial substation for the municipality.
The Eastwood substation was built nine years ago, but before it could be commissioned the municipality had fallen prey to corruption and looting, depleting its budgets and paralysing its operations. Since then, the substation has sustained damage from vandalism to the tune of R60m, and businesses are subjected to days-long outages and power surges that damage their equipment.
A team of private-sector engineers, hired by the Chamber to work with the municipality, identified the Eastwood substation as key to solving the problem. In order to overcome the municipality’s lack of funds to repair and maintain its infrastructure, the Chamber proposed a public private partnership in which it would pay for the commissioning of the substation, and the city would then compensate participating businesses through discounts on their power bills over time.
Both of the Chamber’s proposals – the security plan as well as the plan to repair the substation – are currently being evaluated by Treasury, says Mel.
Meanwhile, businesses are collaborating in many other ways to counter the effects of municipal decay. Many businesses and communities are coming together to fix potholes in their streets.
The Chamber has also become a crucial link between agencies such as the police and municipality, and also between frustrated business owners and the municipality’s struggling departments. Mel points out that the municipality still has a number of enthusiastic and capable operational staff members. One of the Chamber’s key roles is to maintain good relationships with these municipal offices and to provide access to them for their members.
The municipality is currently under administration, meaning that the provincial and national government have taken over certain functions as an emergency measure. There have been some improvements in annual audit results, but Mel reckons there is still some way to go before things get better, and much will depend on whether the corrupt officials will be held accountable.
But the crisis has also brought out the best in Pietermaritzburg. “The one thing that the looting did show us is the need for us to know our neighbours, to collaborate. The city is full of people with a lot of heart and passion for the community. We will keep on fighting,” she says.
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