THE GATHERING 2026: Fixing failing cities is in business’s own interest, leaders say

Business could not afford to remain an “island of prosperity in a sea of poverty” while South Africa’s municipalities continued to deteriorate, University of the Free State Chancellor Bonang Mohale warned.

Speaking at Daily Maverick’s The Gathering in Cape Town on Friday, 11 September, Mohale argued that businesses should stop viewing interventions in struggling communities and cities as corporate social investment (CSI) projects and instead recognise them as an investment in their own future markets.

“Because business cannot be an island of prosperity in a sea of poverty. When business does well, ordinarily, South Africans do well,” said Mohale, a former president of Business Unity SA.

The discussion, with the theme “Should business be helping to fix cities and invest in them? Is there a return on the investment or is it a bottomless pothole?”, included Mohale, Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber CEO Denise van Huyssteen and SA Harvest CEO Ozzy Nel.

Creating future markets

Mohale said the failure of government institutions had already created opportunities for private businesses. He pointed to the decline of the SA Post Office, where operational and financial problems had led to some branch closures, and the growing reliance on private healthcare through medical aid as examples of how private alternatives emerged when public services fell short.

But he also argued that business needed to become more deliberate about its role in society.

“I think business needs to disabuse itself of thinking that when it helps society, they’re doing corporate social investment,” he said.

“No, they are creating the market of the future.”

South Africa’s relatively small population meant businesses could not simply rely on existing markets indefinitely, he said.

“The continent of Africa is 1.5 billion people. In South Africa, there’s only 65 million of us. So we’re not enough.

“So we have to create the market. Otherwise, honestly, where will business get its customers from?”

‘We’re tired of all the talking’

Van Huyssteen offered a practical example from Nelson Mandela Bay, where the business community has increasingly stepped into the gap created by municipal dysfunction.

She said businesses in the metro had moved beyond complaining about poor services and had organised themselves to address problems affecting their operations and the wider community.

“We’re tired of all the talking,” she said.

More than half of the municipality’s rates and taxes and payments for services were contributed by businesses, Van Huyssteen said, arguing that this gave the business community a legitimate interest in how the municipality was run.

The chamber has also used the technical expertise in Nelson Mandela Bay’s manufacturing sector to help tackle municipal infrastructure problems.

Manufacturing accounts for about 22% of the city’s economy, she said, giving the area a pool of engineers and technicians who could help to identify and address infrastructure failures.

About two to three years ago, engineers from companies, including Volkswagen and Aspen Pharmacare, were brought in after the business community identified major problems with the city’s sanitation system.

They analysed it, helped to guide municipal engineers and prioritised interventions, resulting in an improvement in the system’s availability rate to about 80%, although Van Huyssteen said this had since declined.

The chamber’s role has also involved navigating a notoriously unstable political environment. Since 202o, Nelson Mandela Bay has had 19 city managers.

Van Huyssteen said rather than aligning itself with a particular political party, the chamber met with every political party represented in council.

“We gave them all the same message that your political instability causes municipal instability which causes economic instability, and you’re all part of the problem,” she said.

The chamber has also joined forces with civil society, trade unions, churches and NGOs to develop a plan to rebuild the city ahead of the local government elections on 4 November.

“We’re going to be putting pressure on them to implement the plan,” she said.

‘The consequences of doing nothing are far worse’

Van Huyssteen acknowledged that businesses risked reputational damage when they became involved in fixing municipal problems, particularly when interventions failed because of factors outside their control.

But she said the alternative was worse: “The consequences of not doing anything are far worse.”

The chamber has built its approach around practical interventions. Ahead of a planned national stayaway, businesses in its geographic clusters collected 7,000 tyres to prevent them from being used in protests.

“The next day was peaceful,” she said.

For SA Harvest CEO Ozzy Nel, the lesson was that businesses should identify the right partners, understand the problem through data and build solutions that could be scaled.

He said companies needed to ensure that efforts to improve communities were not dependent solely on the enthusiasm of a “chief executive”.

“If you just have the top guy that says yes, [but] you don’t have the buy-in of the team, it’s going to be short-lived,” Nel said.

Instead, he said, the effort needed to become part of the culture of the business.

Mohale, however, returned to the question of self-interest, arguing that business had a role to play precisely because it had the expertise and resources to deliver large projects.

“Only businesses know how to deliver mega projects on time, on budget, and in full,” he said.

For Van Huyssteen, however, the intervention should not mean becoming an extension of the government.

She said the chamber did not accept money from the government and maintained its independence.

“We’re very clear about who we are, what we stand for, and I think independence is important,” she said. DM