Acts of God triggered by tribal mafias

OH, FOR those innocent days a decade back when the words of the year – selected by international dictionary compilers – were egocentric ephemera like “selfie”, “youthquake”, “geek” and “bingewatch”.

More recently, the tone has become more serious and ominous, with “Brexit”, “fake-news” and “climate-strike”. No surprise that last year it was words like “lockdown”, “pandemic” and “isolation”.

In South Africa – not yet, but soon – look out for force majeure.

Admittedly, it’s a linguistic migrant. But still, this bit of French legalese is a concept that ordinary South Africans, especially on the eastern seaboard, are becoming uncomfortably familiar with.

A loose translation is “act of God”, and it’s inserted in business contracts to excuse the parties of liability for natural and unavoidable catastrophes.

The July insurgency was the first time it emphatically impinged on the public consciousness.

In short order, the ports and rail operator Transnet declared force majeure on all contracts relating to traffic through the port of Durban, while the refining and pipeline operator, Sapref, did the same.

Assmang resorted to force majeure on its ferromanganese production, as did Transalloys. So too, for a second time, did Transnet, following a cyberattack. But the trend had started marginally before the civil unrest.

In May, Australian-owned Richards Bay Minerals (RBM) justified the closure of its entire operation, which contributes R8billion a year to the KwaZulu-Natal economy, on force majeure, when its general manager was gunned down and equipment set ablaze in friction with tribal leaders.

Even earlier, in 2019, just across the border from the mutinous Zulu kingdom, an Austrian-South African joint venture used force majeure to abandon what was to be the longest, highest bridge in the southern hemisphere.

The Mtentu bridge was to be the first leap across the rugged Wild Coast landscape for the muchneeded but perennially delayed N2 highway meant to link KZN, Port St Johns and East London.

The reason? Violent protests by the locals.

In much of rural South Africa, but especially along the East Coast of KZN and the Eastern Cape – areas where economic and social development is desperately needed – communities are playing a dangerous game of blackmail and intimidation. Corporates are held hostage and forced to make massive pay-offs to criminal gangs masquerading as tribal chieftains and local leaders.

The ANC government is unable or unwilling to intervene forcefully, so the feudal bandits are thriving. The RBM experience is a case study in this game of economic roulette.

Its force majeure paused the implementation of a R6.7bn project. Operations could be restarted only after RBM restored the “flow of funds”, in this case R130m, to the amakhosi, the traditional leaders in the regions where RBM operates.

Business Maverick editor Tim Cohen dug behind the bland RBM and government press releases to grapple with the implications.

He wrote: “The mine reopens, which satisfies the company and shareholders, the government gets its tax and the ‘community’ groups get their pay-offs.

“But I think it’s pretty clear that if you put R130m on the table, there is a pretty huge incentive to create havoc to get it. Or to create havoc to ensure other people don’t get it.”

There is little sign that the government understands this.

On the contrary, Ramaphosa’s administration seems to live in a parallel universe where merely wishing something will make it so.

This week, Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma announced that the ANC had been secretly working on a plan for a spanking new city, “somewhere” on the coast between Port St Johns and Margate.

The city will promote new black industrialists – read ANC cadres – while “capturing the imagination of the people in asserting the ANC as leader of society”, according to Dlamini Zuma.

This is barmy stuff. On experience and given that destructive “acts of God”, perpetrated by humans rather than the elements, are becoming worryingly frequent along our eastern seaboard, it’s probably safe to predict that the ANC’s model city is not going to be built soon.

And that you won’t be able to access it by taking the Ramaphosa Bullet over a world-class engineering marvel spanning the Mtentu River.