By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber has called for a declaration of State of Disaster on the vandalism and theft of infrastructure that is occurring at an industrial scale and crippling the South African economy.
NMB Business Chambers sent a formal request to Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma to take this drastic step to protect public assets that are essential to service delivery and supporting investment and job creation.
“We don’t advocate for such a step lightly, especially given that the country has only recently emerged from two years of successive states of disaster imposed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“However, a state of disaster of this nature should not affect the daily lives and movement of the general public, as it would be specifically targeted at protecting infrastructure and monitoring, tracking down and prosecuting the perpetrators of these crimes,” said NMB Business CEO Denise van Huyssteen.
According to the NMB Business Chamber, throughout 2022, copper cable and infrastructure theft from rail and electricity networks are estimated to cost the economy R45 billion annually, while the broader knock-on impact of cable theft across the economy is estimated to be R187 billion.
Van Huyssteen said that the Business Chamber Board believed that cable and infrastructure theft, vandalism, and sabotage are the greatest current threat to the South African economy and that it met the criteria for a state of disaster as specified in the Disaster Management Act.
The criteria met regarding the definition of a disaster in the Act are as follows, as outlined by van Huyssteen:
- Theft of cables and infrastructure and associated vandalism is widespread across the country;
- It is human-caused and can (and does) lead to death or injury;
- It causes damage to property, infrastructure and the environment. There is also the knock-on effect of lost productivity and wages;
- It is disruptive to the life of a community, in the inconvenience of electricity and water outages caused by theft, and in the resulting loss of lives and livelihoods; and
- It is also clear that the magnitude and scale of the problem are beyond the ability of individual municipalities, state-owned enterprises, metro police services and national security and intelligence services acting alone to secure infrastructure adequately, prevent these crimes, and enforce the law with sufficient deterrent effect.
This call for the declaration of a state of disaster by the NMB Business Chamber comes after a year of unprecedented amounts of sabotage reports from critical state-owned enterprises such as Eskom, Transnet, Telkom, and The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa).