New shoots attest to provincial resilience
Hope prevails after devastating fires
THE FIRES that devastated the Garden Route region in the past few weeks displaced thousands of citizens and cut a trail of destruction along the coast of the Western Cape. But they also triggered an incredible outpouring of generosity from ordinary South Africans and revealed the natural resilience of our province.
There is no better symbol of this than the fynbos shoots that are already emerging from the ashes. Periodic fires are key to the fynbos life cycle, and soon they will yield flowers just as beautiful as before.
What the fire damages temporarily, it does not destroy permanently. This offers little consolation to those who have lost everything, but it shows how – even in troubled times – hope prevails.
For those of us that work at Wesgro, the government agency responsible for the economic promotion of Cape Town and the Western Cape, this reminder comes at an important time.
Our country’s economy has entered into a technical recession, and unemployment is rising. The effect of this has been a nose-dive in business confidence, which will only make attracting investment more difficult.
A sustained economic recovery in South Africa will require many difficult reforms and bold decisions. But a recovery will also need us to nurture the pockets of economic success that can re-establish confidence in our economy.
With a major construction and tourism boom under way, a green energy sector creating thousands of jobs, and with Cape Town emerging as the leading tech ecosystem on the continent, our regional economy appears to be bucking the national trend.
But is the best we could be doing? We need to be honest about the obstacles that stand in the way of our success – so that we can work together to remove them.
Each of our provinces has an agency like Wesgro, but our model is unique because it holds mandates from both the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Provincial Government. Even this expanded mandate, however, still leaves many policy areas out of direct reach and – in some cases – caps our region’s growth potential.
This acts to hamper the healthy competition between city and regional economies that could enhance national competitiveness. Indeed, competition forces provinces to take more innovative steps to attract investors, maximising growth potential and ensuring job creation. California in the US, Victoria in Australia and Bavaria in Germany are cases in point.
One only has to consider the ongoing commuter rail situation in Cape Town to see how decisions by one sphere of government can negatively impact the economy of another. If the solution lies in giving more say to local governments to build truly integrated public transport networks, it should be a national economic priority to make this happen.
This would require more collaboration and the willingness to have honest conversations about what will help the South African economy. After all, an investor that builds a factory in the Cape will contribute to the national fiscus just as much as an investor committing to any other province.
The benefit of such an approach is already proving its value. While our national flag carrier has decided not to use Cape Town International as an international airport, over the past two years our Cape Town Air Access project – supported by our regional governments, private companies, Cape Town Tourism, the Airports Company of SA and SA Tourism – has worked directly with airlines to launch nine new air routes to the city, adding more than 600 000 new seats.
Another excellent example is the soon-to-belaunched investor centre we will be opening in Cape Town in conjunction with the Department of Trade and Industry’s InvestSA unit and 12 other national, provincial and local entities that service investors. This will be one of only a handful of “one-stop- shops” focused on making it easier to invest in South Africa, and is part of a national government initiative which we warmly welcome.
We need to emulate these success stories wherever possible so that we can nurture the pockets of hope in our economy, grow the national economy and create jobs. If we do this, we can beat this recession and ensure that a stronger economy emerges out of the ashes.