The rate of unemployment in SA is too high to ignore. To address this problem, we need to pay attention to how our cities are managed and utilised as epicentres of work opportunities.
In particular, our metropolitan municipalities have potential to become productive instruments of human development that can enable major labour-absorbing industries and related investments to overwhelm our cities.
Such a strategy would be targeted at making our cities develop local and self-reliant economies where all residents can generate a good quality of life, dignified livelihoods, in an economic landscape facilitated by their own municipal government.
I say this because there are two issues that a metropolitan municipality cannot run away from:
• Firstly, at the core of SA’s unemployment crisis is the deindustrialisation of its economy over the past four decades. Since the mid-1970s, the manufacturing sector has been in decline.
Factories have been closing in Dimbaza, Zwelitsha, Mdantsane, KwaThema, eMalahleni, Port Elizabeth, and Durban – they have all moved to China, Bangladesh and India. This collapse of industry has been happening without a counter-strategy in place from our political leadership to prevent such massive disinvestments.
• Secondly, poor maintenance of our infrastructure by municipalities and the lack of targeted spending towards its modernisation prevent our cities from receiving domestic and international investment on a large scale.
We cannot expect any investor to build factories in a city that does not have proper roads and a reliable railway line. All the prospects of creating work opportunities become impossible without these basics in place.
But, to create a path out of this crisis and restore public confidence to SA cities as theatres of investment, the municipalities must begin to pay attention to these pressing economic questions.
This would only be possible when local government gets anchored on an industrialisation strategy that is purposeful about community engagement. The best engineers and political leaders in the early days of city development were trained and attached to local government.
There are three possible ways to emulate that track record:
• Firstly, there should be an uncompromising building, upgrading, and modernisation of the infrastructure that would create a conducive environment for our cities to foster a labour-intensive industrial economy.
Our cities need reliable electricity supply, efficient water management services, quality roads, a modern railway and technologically-driven ports and digital commerce to generate a modern economy.
• Secondly, municipalities must be active in supporting the development and growth of small-medium businesses that are industrial in nature and driven by young people and women, especially those who come from impoverished communities.
Small-medium industrial businesses are the backbone of every economic powerhouse around the world. They are the key enablers of job creation, youth development, and economic transformation in the US, China, Russia, India and France.
In Arica, we can see that street entrepreneurship eases the burden of poverty and unemployment as communities produce self-reliant initiatives right across our continent.
• Thirdly, municipalities must host the technical talents, skills, training, attitudes, energies, and convictions of care that we need to run cities. It is engineers, scientists, technological experts, economists, and astute political leadership that run a city on a daily basis.
Municipalities must phase out bloated administrations and begin to source the scientific personnel required to operate optimally and thrive.
When local residents are absorbed into a labour intensive economy on a mass scale, their levels of income and access to further opportunities increase – and they can contribute productively to the revenue base of the municipality.
A modernised infrastructure and an industrious local economy would unlock other multiplier areas of the economy such as tourism, the automotive industry, the hospitality sector, and new property markets for emerging entrepreneurs.
Across the world, it is such economies currently standing on full employment and they all have a common approach to local municipal governance. The space of local government should not be a sphere without purpose.
Rather, local government must be equipped with an economic mandate to position our cities and towns as seats of commercial prosperity for all of us.
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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