Cluster approach needed to tackle metro challenges
Denise Van Huyssteen CEO of the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber
The reason motivational quotes encouraging teamwork and collaboration in the workplace are oft-repeated is that they are mostly true.
Pooling the resources and skills of people with diverse backgrounds and experiences to achieve a common goal makes practical sense.
In Nelson Mandela Bay, this notion is gaining ground as a way for organisations to work together towards shared goals.
Businesses clustered in different industrial areas of the city or affected by issues facing specific sectors are beginning to collaborate with each other, the chamber and local authorities to tackle shared issues at a micro level.
A long-running example is the cluster of high energy users, manufacturers with exceptionally high electricity demand requirements for running operations such as foundries, who have worked with the chamber over several years to engage the municipality, Eskom and national electricity regulator Nersa on unsustainable electricity pricing.
The expertise of the high energy cluster has assisted the chamber in making meaningful submissions to Nersa public hearings on Eskom tariff increase requests, and in a successful court challenge that set aside the approved increase in 2017, which ultimately benefited consumers and businesses not only in the metro but countrywide.
Working with high energy users, the NMB and Pietermaritzburg chambers recently launched a new legal challenge to the methodology used by Nersa to calculate and approve municipal electricity tariffs.
Success in our argument that the methodology is not only irrational, but unlawful, will positively affect customers of municipalities across SA.
Herein lies the power of collaboration — benefits ripple out beyond the initial participants.
In the industrial area of Perseverance, for example, the efforts of the businesses there to protect and maintain electricity, water and road infrastructure, improve security and deal with issues like Illegal dumping, will have a beneficial ripple effect on services to the surrounding community, where many of their employees live.
Perseverance industrialists have just signed a milestone agreement to establish a business association to represent them with a united voice in engaging government on their challenges and working together to rejuvenate the area to protect investment and jobs.
We stand firmly behind initiatives like this because these businesses’ commitment to working together proactively to make a positive difference aligns with the chamber’s action-orientated approach to resurging the local economy.
Approaching issues as a collective is more impactful and allows businesses, as key drivers of economic activity and jobs, to establish a platform for engagement and collaboration with government and social partners.
The collective approach enables a consolidated overall strategy for an area or sector, which has more influence than any one business on its own.
Recently we worked with the Deal Party Forum to facilitate a site inspection by the mayor and a high-level delegation to see the issues on the ground, as the first step to arriving at collective solutions; we are working with Struandale businesses on a cluster to be formed to address challenges in that area.
The level of support and positive feedback from key government partners and stakeholders has been encouraging, underscoring that we all share the same goal of growing the local economy.
Aside from macro issues like water and electricity supply, some challenges are specific to a sector and better handled as a collective to engage with complex sets of role players.
Bulk ore handling and transportation, for example, makes a significant, positive impact on the metro economy but there are also issues of regulation and environmental effects, as well as improving the logistics infrastructure of the Northern Cape-Eastern Cape rail corridor.
The chamber is working with the ore handling businesses to address their needs with government and other stakeholders, and to resolve issues around their optimal operations, balanced with impact on the city.
Similarly, the planned move of the tank farm from the Port of PE to the Port of Ngqura presents liquid bulk fuel operators with particular challenges around timing, logistics and costs, potentially affecting businesses and consumers.
A multipronged, multistakeholder approach is required to ensure security of fuel supply to the city, and thus another cluster approach which the chamber is facilitating.
Our local economy is at a tipping point — we are either on the brink of a fast descent to the bottom or the start of a new way forward where we work together, using collective reach, resources and skills to fix what is broken.
The chamber will continue to facilitate the organic growth of more clusters as a response to deteriorating municipal infrastructure and services.
Working together towards common goals can only make a positive difference and help resurge our metro.