Is Ugu District Municipality really aware of the damage currently being visited on the local economy by its inability to fully execute its core mandate of providing water and sanitation to its residents and businesses?
Apparently not, as the same platitudes continue to be rolled out as they lurch from crisis to crisis: insufficient resources, flood damage and ageing infrastructure. There appears to be no long, or even medium term sustainable strategies in place to reverse the downward spiral in negative sentiment toward the municipality that pervades the entire District.

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Negative comments

The fabric of the tourism industry is being torn apart. An investor in the local industry who owns rental property along the coastal belt, reminded me that adverse comments posted online by visitors who may get caught up in the water outages, continue to haunt them for years.

Presently, she is unable to rent properties in the Port Edward area due to the dire situation there -foregone income that will never be recovered. Trafalgar-based upmarket B&B owner Grant Horak recently shared with me that he had cancelled a swathe of booking from overseas guests, as he could get no assurance from Ugu as to restoration of water supply.

Impact
Outside of the tourism sector, business owners continue to flood us with statistics on the impact to their enterprises: case in point is a major wholesale group having to invest up to R5m in water storage and pumping infrastructure to ensure that their sprinklers would work in the event of a fire – Ugu cannot guarantee sufficient pressure in the system anymore. This after having to pay hundreds of thousands to Ugu for a dedicated ‘fire main’ at their premises.

Other developers are now having to factor in additional costs for stand-by water installations, and these increased cost burdens are going to be a certain disincentive to future property investors.

Balance
An often-overlooked consequence is that companies with large numbers of staff, even if they may not need water for their production or operations, cannot run normally if they cannot provide working ablutions or canteen facilities.

While the business sector is not insensitive to the challenges faced by Ugu in finding the optimum balance between maintenance and upgrading of infrastructure, and also the rolling out of services to communities that were previously overlooked, the reality is that almost 20 years after its formation, the reasonable expectation is that a sustainable business model to support these imperatives ought to be in place.

After matriculating, I studied Economics in the UK. Upon my return, I joined the family construction business as MD for 10 years.

I subsequently joined my sister in our furniture manufacturing business as director for quality assurance and operations. I was responsible for all quality aspects of our product, and led the project to us achieving an ISO 9000 quality accreditation. As an export focused business, this was important for our international competitiveness.

I have an abiding interest in quality management and productivity improvement, particularly in manufacturing. More recently, I have focused a lot of my time on giving back to community by way of mentorship of small businesses and sitting on the executive of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce. I also sit on the Board of the Ugu South Coast Development Agency.

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