Durban loses the face of its fun
Rides go under the hammer as beachfront ‘deteriorates’
● Rides at Funworld, on the Durban beachfront, went under the hammer last week after third-generation owner Nic Steyn had battled in vain to sell the family business.
The eThekwini municipality refused to provide potential investors and buyers with the security of a new long-term lease, insisting it has plans to redevelop the site itself.
Steyn’s vision of mentoring a new owner also did not materialise.
Last week the 75-year-old amusement park’s 15 mechanical rides, from dodgems to a cableway, went under the hammer in an auction by Dales Bros, which announced the online sale “with a heavy heart” on its Facebook page. The auction
an event Steyn says he was loath to follow too closely because he held out hope that “it’s not over until it is over finally closed on May 3.
“Everything is going on online auction with Dales Bros. The municipality did a valuation in October 2021 and its valuation of an independent appraiser came to R56m, but I think its real value is about half that about R28m,” Steyn says.
He believes age, at a park that is so old, is not an issue. Rides at overseas fun parks can be more than 100 years old and still operating, he says.
“If it is built well and well maintained it can run for a long time,” Steyn says. He should know his family’s business on Marine Parade has been operating since 1948.
“There were opening bid prices, but it is all subject to the seller’s confirmation none of the bids is confirmed. There is one lot that includes the entire park, all in place as it stands. If somebody thinks they can speak to the municipality and get some sense, they can bid on that and carry on with the park,” he says.
Steyn says he has laboured for the past 12 years to get the municipality to extend the lease on the property, to no avail. He says an interested investor walked away from a potential deal as a result.
“I can’t sell [the business] unless the municipality gives a lease. I have resigned myself to the fact that it is all going to be sold,” he says.
“It is part of Durban and because of what it is as a holiday city, an icon. I know that is what has captured everyone’s imagination and attention,” Steyn says.
“It is people’s livelihoods, jobs and families those who sell beads and T-shirts and the woman who sells spiced pineapple at our gate. They survive off people coming to Funworld.”
Funworld employs 30 permanent staff as well as casual workers during holidays and long weekends.
“We also provide business to other services that come and assist us with hydraulics,” he says.
Steyn’s grandfather ran an amusement train on North Beach near the Snake Park. His father bought the train and established the park. In 2000 his family built and designed the old Durban Water Park at the Village Green site where Suncoast
Casino now stands.
For Funworld manager Neville Arthur, the closure of the park where he has worked for 45 years represents the end of his career. If he were able, he says, he would have bought the park where he has worked since he was 18.
eThekwini says Steyn asked to cancel his lease with it on May 30 and that it had “big plans” for the site.
“One of the many options that the city explored for the site was to make the theme park part of uShaka Marine World, but this fell through because the current operator was not willing to provide the financial information that would have enabled uShaka to make an informed decision,” the municipality says in a statement.
eThekwini city manager Musa Mbhele says the city hopes a successful developer “will deliver a world-class facility”.
Durban Chamber of Commerce & Industry president Prasheen Maharaj blames the municipality for the park’s demise.
“Recently the positive spinoffs were minimal due to the deterioration of the Durban beachfront,” he says. “Key city attractions have become sterile environments with little vibrancy and no real imagination by the municipality. Spaces that should be bustling with creative industries, small business and patrons have become isolated and deserted.”
He says crime and grime are threatening the sustainability of businesses along the beachfront.
● Connie Bloem says ordinary people can get involved in trading and is using technology to show them how.
In 2019 Bloem founded Netherlands-based
Mesh.Trade with Andries Brink, CEO of the 42Markets Group, a specialist fintech group focused on building and supporting capital markets technology platforms for investment banks and central banks.
The pair have vast experience in the financial business and realised it is “intrinsically broken”. Global markets function, says Bloem, “but it takes so long and costs so much to conclude any trade”. She says the middle men who mediate the trades “create unnecessary waste”.
A sophisticated financial instrument has layers of service providers, distributors, brokers, custodians, depositories, compliance officers, registries, exchanges, banks, tax advisers and lawyers. Each charges a fee for facilitating a trade between buyers and sellers. The capital market has long operated on old, inflexible, expensive technology and many manual processes that make it an industry ripe for modernisation, says Bloem.
She says Mesh can accommodate any financial asset from multibillion-dollar trade finance packages to institutional bonds, from exchangetraded funds (ETFs) to exchange traded notes (ETNs) and unit trusts, even simple listed stocks and cryptocurrencies, and a wide range of traditionally illiquid alternative financial assets.
She says Mesh opens the financial markets to any investor, from the CFO of a financial institution looking to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars into a high-yield instrument, to a single mother sitting at her laptop looking to invest a few hundred rand.
Bloem, a graduate of the University of Pretoria, started her career at Accenture and in 2016 became a business analyst at IT services and consulting firm Andile Solutions. They implemented big treasury and trade systems within the banks. Treasury services concentrate and invest client funds, offer solutions for trade finance and logistics, and protect, value, clear and maintain investor and broker-dealer portfolios. For a bank, this is a source of risk-free income.
“It was just a love affair from the start with anything technology related,” says Bloem. “The appearance of bitcoin in 2012 may also have influenced me to a large extent. My friends and I started dabbling quite early on, just because it was fascinating.”
Bloem was comfortable with technology and “enjoyed checking things out”. Blockchain, a digital ledger of transactions, never frightened her. She was intrigued by the concept, the technology, the decentralisation and the freedom that it promised. “I had a feeling that [blockchain] will be big, and when we started seeing the secondary chains coming through, like ethereum, and people started building projects around it, I knew it wasn’t just a buzzword.”
Bloem’s husband, Hendri Breedt, who landed a job in Paris, works in alternative energy at a firm in Europe. She jokingly describes the relationship as one saving the banks while the other saves the planet.
Passionate about processes and “fixing things”, Bloem saw the potential of blockchain and wanted to work in the business. “I’d thought about some of the earlier companies, where we’d done some arbitrage trading, but nothing stuck until we started Mesh.”
Part of a difficult job is to create simplicity out of complexity, she says. “How can I explain this to someone without intimidating them, that will make them feel like this is something they can understand, contribute to and find interesting?”
A lot of people think that investment is just this one lucky strike, says Bloem. Imagine living in a world where you could see companies like Apple coming up and then invest in them.
“Blockchain makes everything easier to use. It makes things more transparent, and it makes things less complex. In its essence, it gives you a mechanism to see who owns what, and who did what, without anything being corrupted.”
Blockchain fundamentally takes away all barriers to entry because it removes intermediary services that redirect from the centre of the markets. “Keeping you away from the action, the place where all the big boys play and function, to give you a place to transact with your R10, where someone else transacts with their R10bn.”
Mesh.Trade provides infrastructure for the entire business and because of its underlying technologies, there is capital to be raised.
She says much becomes possible and the layers of intermediaries mentioned earlier, who just take money off the table, are no longer a hindrance. “You suddenly have a route to market where you don’t have to go through a broker or one of the 20 intermediaries; you can play directly at the centre of the capital markets and that is just so exciting,” says Bloem.