KZN business leaders need ‘hope’ to grow economy:
KwaZulu-Natal businesses have emerged resilient and stronger than ever after enduring the recent triple crises that hit the province despite the currently high level of unemployment and low economic growth forecast for the region.
Toyota South Africa vice president and immediate past president of the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Nigel Ward, speaking during a business leadership panel discussion hosted in the city by Investec on Friday, said the Covid-19 pandemic, July 2021 civil unrest and April 2022 floods had instilled resilience and united the people of the province.
“I think the three crises made the province stronger and that’s quite ironic, because there’s been a lot of sorrow as we’ve gone through those three big events. But each one has made us stronger for the next one,” he said.
“I tell our team at Toyota every day there is going to be an event in 2024 … and there will be a 2025 event and each one of these, as we stack them up together, is giving us a different perspective of how to change.”
Ward was upbeat about the economic outlook and the rebuilding of the province after the devastating floods, which cost the province more than R17 billion in damages, despite Investec’s forecast of 1,1% growth in 2023.
Ward said he believed the 14 key sectors active across the province had already emerged “stronger” because of the crises and that the government would “turn around” factors hindering economic growth, including the country’s energy crisis and inefficiencies in Durban Port that struggles with cargo handling delays.
He said he was confident that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office and business leaders were collaborating to confront the priority challenges of energy security, safety and security and logistics after 115 CEOs signed a pledge to assist the government with technical expertise and funding to “reverse the current trajectory”.
“I’m really positive about what’s happening at the port. It will turn around and I am positive about what’s happening with the energy crisis, it will turn around, but not many people know about it. And between the public and private sector, they’re going to start informing people to create that positive energy,” Ward said.
“The people that are running the province, the businesses, it doesn’t matter where they sit in the value change, they need to have some level of confidence that there is hope.”
Ward said it was important for businesses to collaborate with the government on small projects to achieve change. He said had eThekwini Municipality and businesses had not worked together to repair infrastructure in the South Durban Basin after the floods, many small businesses would still be closed.
“We formed some really small partnerships around water, sanitation, power, safety and security that are now widening the circle of influence in the South Devon basin and getting wider and wider … That’s the first point of collaboration that changes the eye point and the mindset that then develops into saying, ‘we’re going to fix the power station’.”
He added that to confront crime and corruption the courts should be open seven days a week.
Shave & Gibson managing director Simon Downes said the big problem facing businesses is load shedding and during the three recent crises, inefficiency and congestion at Durban Port, which has been hampered by ongoing equipment shortages, had been a “major challenge”.
“Our supply chains in some cases have gone up from six weeks to six months and the reason for this is trans shipping. A lot of shipping lines stopped coming here so we were trans shipping from South America through Europe and some ships just kept on going and offloaded on Dares Salem. In London we had to invest in space and inventories and in some cases our working capital ‘trembled’,” he said.
“What we learned is there is no white knight in this country, there is no state support, you’re on your own, so you’re going to be resilient otherwise you aren’t going to survive, and the other thing is you have got to develop very strong logistics relationships.”
He said the port was hampered by equipment that was not properly maintained because politicians would not allow Transnet’s workshops to open on weekends to expedite repairs. He said the port had 128 straddle cranes (a freight-carrying vehicle) three years ago but only had 55 presently.
However, Downes said he is confident that Transnet Port Terminals’ 25 year public private partnership with global port operator, Manila-headquartered International Container Terminal Services, will enable Transnet to grow its cargo volume handling significantly from 1,7 million TEU (twenty foot equivalent units) per annum to 2,9 million TEU per annum over the next two years.
“This is going to revolutionise Durban, it is going to revolutionise transport. And this is the beginning,” he said.
Downes said he believed the government would solve the energy crisis by the end of 2024 as planned.
Investec head of business sales Itumeleng Marafe gave an overview of the national and provincial economic outlook saying crime and corruption had to be confronted to achieve growth.
He said according to the latest Statistics South Africa Quarterly Labour Force Survey the official KZN unemployment rate is 31% compared to 32,6% nationally, while youth unemployment was a “scary” 59% in KZN, which could have contributed to the July 2021 riots.
“What scares me about these numbers is how stats SA measures unemployment,” he said.
He said the survey included scab labourers who waited on street corners to do odd jobs, asking them the question ‘in the past week did you do at least one hour of labour?’ and then including these people as employed.
“From a growth perspective KZN has grown at 1,1% compared to a national average of 0,6%,” he said.
He said sectors employing the most people in KZN are community and social services (24%), trade (21%); finance (13%) and manufacturing (12%).
He added that the province had potential to grow its economy further by focusing on its trade and transport sectors and marketing itself as a tourism destination.
“I think there’s a lot of positivity … There’s a lot of opportunity and I think we have a lot of low hanging fruit to be able to turn this economy around.”
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In DRC camps, women face stark choice: hunger or rape:
Patricia, who was displaced by conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, had a hard look in her eye.
Similar to thousands of other women and girls, armed men raped the 15-year-old when she left her displacement camp, near the city of Goma, in search of food.
Hundreds of thousands of people are crammed into miserable displacement camps around the city, hastily erected on fields of mud. They are victims of a vast humanitarian crisis triggered by M23 rebels, who have captured swathes of North Kivu province since launching an offensive in late 2021.
Rwanda backs the Tutsi-led M23, according to several Western countries such as the United States and France, although Kigali denies it. Most residents of the displacement camps fled with nothing, and despite humanitarian efforts, food remains scarce.
Patricia and her family fled fighting in North Kivu earlier this year, facing harassment and robbery as they made their way to the relative safety of the Rusayo camp near Goma.
But in late summer, the teenager disappeared.
“I sent her to fetch potatoes in our village, because of hunger,” said Patricia’s mother, who recounted the story as her daughter used a scarf to hide her face. “I thought she was dead.”
Patricia — whose name AFP has changed to protect her identity — turned up again in late September, pregnant. She said ethnic Hutu fighters had captured her. And one raped her over the course of several weeks. Patricia managed to escape one morning after pretending to fetch water.
Sexual violence has long plagued eastern DRC, where armed groups have sown chaos for 30 years.
Sandra Kavira, a Congolese social worker with the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), listened as Patricia’s mother told the tale. Kavira, 28, said she’d heard hundreds of similar stories since she started working at the Rusayo camp in July.
“We get 10 new cases a day, even little four-year-old girls or grandmothers over 80,” she said.
Armelle Zadi, her supervisor at MSF, recalled one bedridden woman who could no longer walk after being subjected to her third gang rape.
“Her daughter had no other choice but to prostitute herself to feed the family,” Zadi said. “Women are prisoners of a cycle of misery.”
If stories of extreme violence are legion, the scale of sexual assaults around Goma is also astronomical. Brian Moller, an MSF emergency coordinator in Goma, said about 70 victims seek treatment at the charity’s facilities every day — or about 2,000 women and girls a month.
“These numbers represent only a part of the reality,” Moller said, explaining that they have figures only for areas where MSF works.
Charmante, 18, dandled a newborn baby on her knee. The mother — whose name AFP has also changed — explained that a man in army uniform had raped her when she left Rusayo. She had intended to gather wood and sell it in order to feed her siblings.
“When he’d finished I couldn’t walk, my friends brought me back to camp,” said Charmante. Two of her friends and her 19-year-old sister were also raped when they left the camp, the young mother said.
A week after her ordeal, Charmante discovered she was pregnant at an MSF clinic. Her baby, Queen, was born a few months later — another mouth to feed.
All the women interviewed by AFP at Rusayo said they had faced a choice, at one moment or another, between hunger and leaving the camp at the risk of rape.
Rose, 43, was no exception.
She had walked for three days with her seven children to reach Rusayo, last November.
Rose was alive to the dangers of leaving the camp — she had been gang-raped once before in 2017 — but was forced to in June, with three female friends.
“We were all raped,” she said, explaining that the attackers were four men in military fatigues.
When she returned to the camp, Rose said her husband had beaten her for getting raped, and then disappeared.
The woman had tears in her eyes as she told her story, clinging to her four-year-old son.
“In the camp, it’s difficult to talk about,” Rose said. “But here, we see our neighbours, girls we know, and we say: oh, you too?” – Agence France-Presse
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BMW X7 M60i is spacious and brisk:
Luxury SUVs are a dime a dozen, yet manufacturers continue to bring more models to the segment to net more customers and, naturally, more profit.
BMW is no exception and when it launched the seven-seater X7, it answered the question that many were asking: “When will BMW build something larger than the X5?”
In 2018, the Bavarian marque launched the X7, which took the fight directly to the Mercedes-Benz GLS and thus brought more practicality for larger families, for whom the X5 didn’t quite cut the mustard, by offering, well, more seats.
Having launched in South Africa in 2019, the X7 managed to plug a hole in Beemer’s product offering at the sharper end of the X model lineup and, while the styling might have initially polarised opinion, I reckon it has become amiable to the beholder.
And now a cosmetic update has been bestowed upon the model, giving it an even edgier design, thanks largely to the reworked front end that sees new headlight clusters and new air skirts but, overall, it’s distinctly the flagship X7.
The cabin gets the firm’s latest curved instrument and infotainment cluster, while the previous crystal-like gear lever has made way for a toggle contraption, in the interests of decluttering the centre console, and it works.
The rest of the cabin’s architecture is familiar, meaning high-quality fit and finish and a functional, rather than flamboyant, design language.
The accessories are well within reach and easily legible, even while on the move.
All seven seats are sumptuous and electronically operated, with the rearmost easily foldable at the push of a button.
This being the flagship M60i derivative, the cabin has lashings of carbon-fibre inserts and an Alcantara roof lining, adding a tasteful premium and sporty ambiance.
Thumping under the bonnet is the marque’s much-vaunted 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 that makes 390kW and 750Nm through an 8-speed automatic transmission and xDrive all-wheel drive, channelling it all.
That engine remains the centrepiece, though, a pearler and purrer of a powerplant that is smooth in operation and has mounds of torque to pull this lumbering SUV with so much conviction that you wonder why you would ever need any more power or, indeed, performance.
That said, paddling the X7 is easy, thanks to the excellent all-around view from the seat.
Parking in tight spaces is also a cinch, despite the size of the vehicle, thanks to the rear-wheel steering that tightens the turning circle.
On-road manners are exemplary and the electronically operated self-levelling suspension means the X7 wafts along effortlessly with few road imperfections permeating the cabin, even with the 23-inch and 315/30-section rear tyres on our test car.
Its serene disposition on the road is welcome in a car designed to transport family and its paraphernalia in absolute comfort.
However, this X7 has a performance streak — the flick of a few switches and a twitch of your right toe, and Bob’s your uncle. This thing doesn’t hang around when asked to gallop. It typically lifts its nose from a standing start or when you bury your right foot while on the move.
It summons all those 390kW and 750Nm in one fell swoop as you reel in the horizon and give those pesky hot-hatches a proper wake-up call as you woosh past them, family and pets in tow.
Under launch control, this thing romps off the line with such vigour that it flicked my smartphone from the charging tray.
But it is the fact that the acceleration doesn’t abate that leaves you stupefied. Unless you are packing more power at the traffic light showdown, best steer clear of taking on this one, lest you get your ego bruised.
The X7 is undeniably fit for purpose — carrying seven people in comfort and, in this M60i version, those jaunts will be fleetingly fast for the most part.
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