South Durban residents protest over city's industrial hub plan

Residents of Clairwood in south Durban picketed outside the eThekwini municipality’s town planning office on Friday against the proposed rezoning of their area as an industrial hub.

The city has embarked on a public participation process to explain the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act (SPLUMA) application master plan, which aims to turn the area from residential to mixed use.

Stakeholders have until April 8 to submit feedback.

Lihle Phewa, head of eThekwini's planning unit, told TimesLIVE the rezoning was an attempt to find balance in land use given the area was strategically located close to the port.

He said some people still wanted to live there while others wanted to conduct business in the area.

“Over the years, there have been a number of logistics-related businesses in the area to take advantage of its proximity to the port. That has resulted in a number of land use conflicts where you have residential land uses mixing with nonresidential uses. So this master plan is trying to address that — how do we bring people to achieve harmony between these land uses, if at all, and what are going to be the infrastructure requirements to make this happen going forward.”

However the proposal has sparked strong opposition from community activists, environmentalists and local ratepayers.

Natural Justice, an environmental law NGO which works with the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance to provide legal perspective on environmental matters in the south Durban basin, believes the plan will affect areas beyond Clairwood.

“You need to have an overall idea of the south Durban area to understand there are existing issues . So bringing something like this under these conditions necessitates us to object to this. The segmentation allows them to say the focus is just Clairwood, whereas we know that the focus is the entire south Durban,” said Celokuhle Zondi, a representative of Natural Justice in south Durban.

Zondi said the city had not played open cards in its application, especially regarding the affect of environmental pollution and irregular waste management practices.

“There is a certain way to conduct this process but they’ve chosen not to and decided to overlook certain very important aspects such as climate change, air quality, biodiversity studies and things like that. We’ve also found that the social affect assessment was missing in this application.”

Demzey Gulabram, deputy chairperson of the Clairwood Ratepayers and Residents Association (CRRA), added: “We feel this will prejudice our residents because it’s very difficult to live next to a trucker or illegal business. The people are fighting (for the municipality) to not rezone the area and to clean up the mess they’ve already created by letting trucking businesses relocate to Clairwood. People are tired of living in very difficult conditions — the fumes, the noise and air pollution — for many years now.”

Residents said among their main concerns are community facilities like mosques, churches and schools, which have been part of the area for decades and will be affected should this plan go ahead.

Gulabram added they have seen the affect of a development like this when people in South Coast road lost houses and business more than 30 years ago with the expansion of the freeway across Clairwood .

“When the people came in here from 1860 the population of Clairwood then was roughly 40,000 to 50,000 and it has now been reduced to roughly 4,000 to 6,000. The municipality has no care for the people but is only looking at profiteering from the trucking and other businesses.”

Swami Vedanand Saraswati, the spiritual head of the Yuvak Arya Samaj in Clairwood, said the proposal was a threat to a “once-thriving community”.

“The saddest thing for me is there is no respect, regard or dignity for a community that has stood the test of time in Clairwood. It is like they are just being wiped off and forgotten about. These are people who have built their homes with blood, sweat and tears. These homes were not inherited.”

He said they felt like the government had forgotten its responsibility to look after the welfare of the most vulnerable, in the name of “progress”.

“How can you justify progress when you’re destroying the people? Our great grandparents are buried in there. There are grave sites that represents a whole demographic of the beautiful diversity that is within Clairwood — the different religious diversities between the Hindi-speaking, Muslims, Christians, African community — we are all there.”

They recommended the city look at dry ports and rail as alternatives.

Zondi said the positive aspect of this is the city was able to do an infrastructure audit which should provide them with a direction of where they can improve to ensure efficient service delivery.

Phewa said the Clairwood residents' objections, with more than 2,000 signatures, would be part of the bigger pot of public input which will inform the final decision on the plan.

The city will respond in three to four working days.

TimesLIVE