Letter from SA's Empangeni and lessons on urbanisation

The oceanside was getting boring after the conference. It was time to leave Richard’s Bay without knowing who Richard was. My destination was Empangeni, a small town only 16 kilometres away but farther inland.

It’s a blacker town compared with Richards Bay. Data on the town population by race is easily available in South Africa (SA).

From Empangeni, I commuted to the University of Zululand at KwaDlangezwa where I made presentations on SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and their innovations in Kenya, SA and China’s trade with Kenya. Wealth distribution, comparing SA and Kenya, is what was most exciting - the Afrikaners or Boers in Kenya from around 1900 to their return to South Africa just before our uhuru. 

The university is built on a hill overlooking the gum (eucalyptus) and sugar cane plantations. It’s over 60 years old and has predominantly black students. I noted some white and Indian faculty. 

Beyond academic presentations, I visited the township of eSikhaleni. A friend I last met in the US Deep South took me there. My image of a township was Kibra, Kangemi or Githogoro. It is more like Umoja before high-rises were built or Nairobi kanjo houses in the 1980s. The township is clean with no high-rise buildings, all uniform and wide streets.

Though South Africans say townships are bad, riddled with unemployment and crime, they are decent places.

The visit to a township gives the impression that Kenya is a disorderly country, more so in urban areas. I did not see any hawkers or motorbikes (boda bodas). We have taken “individual” entrepreneurship to another level. 

Visiting the South African township and surveying the activities, I have no doubt that 80 per cent of the Kenyan economy is informal. South Africa is about 20 per cent. Townships are “bedrooms” for employees working in the industries, sugar farms, eucalyptus plantations and service sectors.

Across the road from the township are tribal lands. I was told the chief can allocate you land to build a house. Traditional chiefs remained in the Rainbow Nation. You know what happened to ours.  In the townships, the land is owned by the municipality. The national government also owns land.

The rest of the land is owned by individuals, trusts and companies, and it’s plenty and empty by Kenyan standards.

Land ownership is complicated by Act No. 13 of 2024 of the Parliament of South Africa, which establishes the framework for compulsory property acquisition by South African government entities. The land acquired through apartheid can now be claimed and redistributed to the original owners if they claim it. Data is available on original ownership.

The Expropriation Act

As we drove around, I wondered what would eventually happen to these large sugar and gum tree plantations beyond the townships and tribal lands. Will they be chopped into small pieces like in Kenya? SA is trying to avoid that by using cooperatives, so that land claimants get economically viable portions and work on them through cooperatives. Remember how cooperatives paid our school fees? In Kenya, we subdivided the large farms but left the small-scale farmers by themselves. Visit Nyandarua, Nakuru or Laikipia and see what happened. Consolidating that land now is a herculean task.

My visit to South Africa taxed my brain on the best model of economic growth and development. 30 years after her uhuru, South Africa seems to be in a decision mode. 

How do you transfer land to new owners and make them economically viable? How do you transfer the skills from the former owners to the new owners? What will happen to old owners?

Will they leave the country or keep their wealth in SA?

How do you balance history, national aspirations, the private sector, the public sector, geopolitics and geo-economics? With so much wealth and land, who else has strategic interests in SA? 

Luckily, the country is industrialised and there is less demand for land. That is why we too should get industrialised. Curiously, I only saw one signboard for “land on sale,” a good indicator of how land is tightly held in SA.

I went beyond economics; it has cousins like sociology. 

Among the Zulu and Swazi, the dowry (lobola) goes down the more children a lady has before marriage.

Did this discourage girls from having children out of wedlock?  Among the Bapendi, it goes up! I was also told that after a divorce, lobola is not returned. And dowry is paid in cows, never goats! 

In SA, you can’t escape child support, very close to the American system and the unintended consequences, like lots of households led by women. The head (Inhloko) is a very popular meal among the Zulu; it was reserved for men, and nowadays anyone can partake in it.  

Kenya fought and waited for uhuru. But political and economic uhuru are different. And the same seems to apply to South Africa and many other countries. The journey to equality, integration and high standards of living is long and exhausting; it requires national boldness and leadership.

Finally, SA has very few churches, at least from the signboards.  Yet my dream of meeting either an inyanga or a sangoma was deferred.