BNC#8: Melanie Veness Q&A - Broken governance, business fightback, and a city’s last chance...

Pietermaritzburg stands at a crossroads. Melanie Veness paints a stark picture of governance failure, economic strain, and post-riot trauma - yet resilience runs deep. From crumbling infrastructure to bold private-sector action, the city’s future hinges on leadership, accountability, and smart investment. As political uncertainty looms in KZN, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Will voters drive meaningful change, or deepen the crisis? Amid the chaos, one truth emerges: South Africa’s recovery will depend on empowered communities and businesses stepping up where the state has fallen short..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Watch here.Listen here.Edited transcript of the Q&A.Alec Hogg:Pietermaritzburg is a fantastic town. I was at prep school there, I was at university there for a wonderful year, but it’s in shambles at the moment. I heard business has been leaving.Melanie Veness:You know, I’ve got to say that we have one of the best business communities in the country. They’re incredibly resilient. They stand together. We discuss what the issues are, we work out what we have to do about them, and they come to the party and pay for it. I mean, this call to action is of benefit for the whole of South Africa.It was important to us, and business funded it. So yes, there are people who are looking elsewhere to establish plants. We’ve got big industries that have established plants elsewhere. We’ve not seen the growth that we should have enjoyed from Pietermaritzburg companies. Some have left, but the majority of them are die-hard Pietermaritzburg.It is an incredible place to live and raise a family. We have probably the greatest concentration of the best schools in the country around the city. The Midlands is absolutely beautiful, where you can be walking in a valley amongst fields of daisies and zebra within 15 minutes of leaving work. It’s an incredible landscape, and the people have amazing hearts. They really are just awesome people.Alec Hogg:So what’s gone wrong?Melanie Veness:Governance. I mean, the municipality has just unapologetically behaved badly and governed poorly. That’s it.Alec Hogg:Are the people paying attention? Because the advantage you have is that right next door is Chris Pappas at uMngeni. And as you know, we have family in Maritzburg, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. When you drive from Hilton, from their home into Pietermaritzburg, it’s incredible. You’ve got this beautiful road and suddenly you’ve got pothole city. It’s like night and day, right next to each other. Are the people of Pietermaritzburg paying attention? And as a consequence, will they use the ballot to change?Melanie Veness:I’m worried about what change the ballot will bring, to be honest. I think people are, to use a good South African word, gatvol. But a lot of them will be looking for what’s the best alternative for me, and that’s the worry.I think there will certainly be a lot of people who decide that’s not the way they want to go, and then won’t vote. It’s interesting. It’s like I was saying to somebody the other day: it’s like being a die-hard Springbok supporter and your team is playing really badly against the All Blacks. Do you change jerseys because your team’s playing badly, or do you just not go to the game?So I hope that the choice people make is either that they vote for positive change. I think the people that are on our programme, who are now running successful businesses, will look for the kind of leadership that creates an enabling environment. That will be their priority. So I hope that either people vote for somebody who will create the kind of environment that allows us to build an economy that everyone has access to, that works for business because business employs, or just don’t go if they can’t find it in their hearts to do it.Alec Hogg:And I think we all hope for the best. But KZN had a troubled period. We had the riots in 2021. The MK party came within a whisker of taking over. How strong, or what is the political temperature there, and how relevant would it be if the MK party were to take control of Pietermaritzburg? I cannot go much further down.Melanie Veness:I mean, I think there’s a possibility in the whole of KZN, because delivery has been so abominable that everybody is gatvol, and they want change because it isn’t working. So people are going to vote for whoever they think is going to bring the most positive change for them.I’m going to go back to the 2021 riots. Standing in Barnsley Road, I stood amongst all the broken machinery and stuff that was pulled out of the businesses there, the broken glass, the smashed stock. I mean, Makro was decimated in that road, as was a warehouse. But lying in the debris and on the riverbank were young people’s bodies.And I will never forget standing there and realising with absolute horror, having gone through those buildings and seen that there was a modus operandi. They disabled the water sprinkler system. They pulled the insulation out of the ceilings. They brought petrol with them. They poured it on. They set it alight. They wrote “Ramaphosa must go back to Venda”. “Zuma is the best president.” And they destroyed all those businesses.But when they did that in that orchestrated manner, and got everybody riled up and invited them to loot and take whatever they liked, they knew, they must have known, that people were going to die in that process. And they did it anyway. And it’s the horror of that that really stays with me.And I know that in our communities people won’t be easily incited to behave in that way again because they were the biggest losers, and they know that. But I don’t think a lot of them realise, and really sit back and think, that whoever was behind this knew the risks to us, and they didn’t care. They did it anyway.Alec Hogg:Rob Hersov a little while ago said, “Get rid of KZN, we don’t need KZN in South Africa. It’s such a mess. Zuma and co, they must just go and make the mess on their own.” Clearly that would not fill you with great delight.Melanie Veness:No, it wouldn’t fill me with great delight. It’s quite mean, actually, I think, from Rob.But yeah, KZN is an amazing province. I think its economy is second to Gauteng in terms of manufacturing size and contribution to GDP. So I think we are important. And aside from that, I think in a lot of ways we’re more real. I know I live in a hell of an exciting place, so it’s never a dull moment.And we probably face things before a lot of South African cities actually get to face them. But there are some realities on the ground that are maybe highlighted more easily in our space that need to be addressed in South Africa. It’s stuff that you can’t ignore. We have to have a country where all South Africans can feel, A, that they have a chance of accessing the economy, and B, most people just want enough: a job to go to, enough to be able to feed their families, to send their kids to school, to pay for transport, have a braai on the weekend, and live a good and decent life.Alec Hogg:So are you saying the challenges that businesses are facing in KZN are the challenges that are likely to be faced elsewhere? And I refer you to what happened last month with Thirsti.Melanie Veness:It’s happening all over. I mean, Thirsti faced the same issue that we’ve been facing for the last five weeks. I keep going out to say to these guys: I’ve met with our provincial SAPS leadership, who, I must say, have done an exceptional job. They’ve got rid of a lot of the construction mafia issues. They’ve been very proactive about dealing with it, and they’ve agreed that they will arrest these guys.Charges need to be filed against them and they need to be arrested. So there’s no issue as far as that’s concerned. But they pop up, they lie about things. They’ve gone to most of the Spars in the area. They stand on video and they say people are doing the most horrendous things. They are forcing their employees to sleep with them, otherwise they fire them. It’s to rile up their communities.And I’ve engaged with them. I’ve gone out and seen them. The last time I was at one of our members, Geyser’s garage, at the entrance to Mpophomeni, they were saying, “This guy rides a big Porsche, and he pays these people R200 a week.” And I know from previous engagements that the likelihood of that happening is very low.We can’t say unequivocally that people are all behaving exactly as they should, but I know from the accusations they made before that it’s very unlikely. And they produced some union papers to say that these people have all joined them and are in the union. It’s just nonsense. Absolute nonsense.They’ve also, by the way, been extorting businesses in the more rural spaces where they go and they say, “Oh, I see that you’re employing some foreign nationals. Yes? Okay, we’ll let you go for the moment, but you must pay this R50,000 for a T-shirt,” or whatever. I mean, they’re extortionists. They really are.Alec Hogg:And what do you advise businesses that get approached in that way?Melanie Veness:What they’ve been doing so far is that they immediately phone me, and I phone our acting district police commissioner, and the police deploy to the scene, remove them and reopen the business.And if there’s any intimidation or trespassing, they open cases and those people are charged, because you can’t simply go around closing businesses and disrupting the economy. The irony is they say they’re going to create jobs for South Africans. They’re doing no such thing. What they’re actually doing is ensuring that there are no jobs for the people who are currently unemployed. They’re not doing anybody any favours, that’s for sure.Alec Hogg:But in Normandien, the police were leading the charge with automatic weapons. So have we got pockets of good police and bad police?Melanie Veness:Yeah, absolutely. When we had the riots, I told you there were people who stood by and just watched. And you still have an element of that. But the provincial leadership have said if there’s any problem like that, it ought to be reported immediately and we ought to hand over the videos. The police that I’ve seen on the scenes I’ve been at have been great.Alec Hogg:So now we get to the point that everybody here should be interested in: Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the head of the police service in KZN. Controversial character. Last time we spoke, you said he’s the man. Do you still feel the same way?Melanie Veness:I can only say what we’ve experienced from him.Alec Hogg:Did I say Lieutenant? Lieutenant-General Mkhwanazi.Melanie Veness:We have found him to be approachable, to be reasonable, and he is absolutely revered in KZN for having had the guts to stand up and expose the corruption of the police. He’s a hero. And nobody will have you say anything other than that.From a business perspective, he’s been fantastic. He’s gone out and dealt with all the crime syndicates that were holding construction areas hostage. He is decisive in dealing with that. He is very well respected in the business community.Alec Hogg:Well, that’s an interesting point because with the Madlanga Commission, particularly Paul O’Sullivan at the ad hoc committee and in Parliament as well, making all kinds of allegations that he is anything but. What’s your reading of that?Melanie Veness:You know, I’ve seen absolutely no indication that there’s anything untoward about him. He’s a career policeman. He’s not shown that there is anything influencing his decision-making in that space. I find what has been said very hard to believe, given the exposure that we’ve had to him.Alec Hogg:And the fact that you’ve made a couple of references already to the police working with business in addressing some of these miscreants suggests that, well, it can’t be all bad.Melanie Veness:No, I mean, they’re certainly stepping up. Election year is always… I’m sorry, the election is only in November, because we’ve got a long year ahead of ourselves. But they’re always super exciting, with people trying to make points.I think one of the things South Africa has to guard against is the idea of celebrating vigilantism. It’s something that we tend to do, definitely in our province and I think in a lot of South Africa. And that comes out of sheer frustration at non-delivery of promises.Alec Hogg:We’re going to the questions in a moment. Just one last issue. You said you’re worried about the consequences of the change in the vote in KZN. What would worry you about MK taking power from the ANC in the province and indeed in Pietermaritzburg?Melanie Veness:Look, I think our city has been so badly run for so long that what we really need is some really good administrative intervention. And the National Treasury has been saying for some time that while we’ve been under a voluntary intervention programme, we should be under mandatory intervention.Pietermaritzburg has the most incredible amount of potential, and what we need is good leadership and a good administration. And I don’t feel confident that we’d get that under MK leadership, given the ill-discipline that we see even in the campaigning.Alec Hogg:But what’s going to change? And I want to refer you to what Piet le Roux said about, I think it was Bultfontein, where they had this chaos. They had another set of elections and the chaos continued. Eventually, because of Sakeliga, they forced National Treasury and the national government to take over. They sued Ramaphosa, or threatened to sue him and the finance minister, and eventually they had to take over. Is that on the cards for Pietermaritzburg? Would that be a solution, a possible solution?Melanie Veness:Look, I think what will happen is we will wait for the outcome of this tariff challenge. If there is a reversal of tariffs back to 2023/24, that has some serious implications for a city that is in dire financial trouble already. And I think that would encourage an intervention by National Treasury.If it doesn’t, then we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board. People who live in Pietermaritzburg and invest in their businesses and their homes are passionate about our city, and we will step up and do what needs to be done in order to ensure that we have a future.Alec Hogg:People who lived in the old Salisbury were very passionate about that city as well. And I guess that’s the question that some cynics would have. Sometimes we see the world as we want it to be rather than what it really is. That’s where I’m getting to. Where’s the solution here?Melanie Veness:The solution is that our city needs to be under administration. We need to remove the politics from it. So we need to put the city under administration, and we need to deal with the corruption, which is endemic at every single level of the organisation. And I’m not alone in that.Alec Hogg:Time to talk to Sakeliga, probably, maybe. Jeremy Wiley has a question: What is the business chamber doing to motivate their members to encourage all their member companies to ensure that their staff register and turn out to vote in the local elections?Melanie Veness:Yeah, we haven’t done anything about that yet, but we certainly will. It’s a great suggestion.Alec Hogg:Michael Asher’s question is: Based on your experience of dealing with municipal Eskom debt, what do you see as the primary drivers of the problem — non-payment, electricity theft and illegal connections, technical losses from ageing infrastructure, tariff pressures, or governance failures? It’s quite a long list, but which is the one, if you could change it, you would?Melanie Veness:Look, I think it’s governance failure. Catastrophic governance failure. It is that leadership makes decisions — I mean, how leadership made decisions to sponsor some crazy soccer teams when we can’t afford to pay our Eskom bill, or our uMngeni Water bill, when we’re making gross trading losses.If you were running a business and you were billing less than what you are paying to Eskom, then you would try to fix that as a first stop, because electricity is used to cross-subsidise a lot of other elements of municipal function. And now you’re making losses. There’s no way you can pay Eskom, and there’s no way you trade your way out of that unless you deal with the losses situation.So it doesn’t make sense why it’s not being dealt with with more vigour — unless it’s condoned.Alec Hogg:It’s extraordinary. Are there any other municipalities that are in worse condition than Pietermaritzburg? Any other big municipalities, members of your association?Melanie Veness:Yeah, absolutely. If you have a look at the number of municipalities around the country that haven’t paid Eskom, that will tell you everything you need to know. They are far worse. We were hearing yesterday about municipalities that can’t even send the bill. So there are municipalities in this country that are totally dysfunctional, and you don’t see anybody actually acting against it. It’s mind-blowing.Alec Hogg:And the business chambers there, are they functional?Melanie Veness:They tend to be smaller places, and so no, you don’t see that they’re functional. But the business community, I know in at least a couple of them, have stood up and they’ve got—Alec Hogg:Harrismith.Melanie Veness:—who’s asking them to take over the municipal electricity functions.Alec Hogg:Yeah, I think Harrismith did that. The locals got involved. So I suppose there is a big role for business as things become more dysfunctional.Dean Fester’s question is: With the major upgrades along the N3 corridor between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, what economic opportunities could this unlock for Maritzburg and the KZN Midlands, and how might this influence the regional property market?Melanie Veness:Yeah, I think the development between Durban and Pietermaritzburg will eventually close up like between Johannesburg and Pretoria. It’s becoming really important from a logistics point of view.Pietermaritzburg has a really important role to play in the province. The proximity to the N3, and the fact that we are just outside the Rust Belt, means that we are really good for metal processing. So we do process a lot of metals. It is really important for us because we’re a lot of industry that is electricity-hungry, power-hungry.And with the N3 being the busiest highway in the country, and the number of trucks, and the need to open up the highway, that’s not going to solve the problem entirely. So there’s talk of the development of logistics hubs, of dry docks, of utilising the trains to take stuff from that region to the port, which is totally congested.So yes, from a logistics point of view, very important. From a development point of view, proximity to the port is also really, really important, and for those that are processing metals—Alec Hogg:Property prices?Melanie Veness:Property prices…Alec Hogg:How are property prices?Melanie Veness:Look, I think property prices are fine in Pietermaritzburg. We’re an interesting city in the sense that we’re a capital city, so we have a big government contingent living in our city and working there.We also have a growing private healthcare sector that’s expanding at a rate of knots, and it makes sense to do that because we have a larger number of people on medical aid than most cities. Being a capital, we have a big retirement community in need of specialist services, and we service a large community into northern KZN where there are no specialist services, or limited specialist services.So it is something that’s growing really, really well. Another thing that you probably won’t know is that a lot of people are choosing to live in the area because it is a wonderful place to raise children. It’s relatively safe. We walk in our forests and things without there being an issue. The schools are exceptional. It’s still really good value, and the people are lovely.So a lot of people set their families up there. We’ve got flights between our airport and Johannesburg several times a day. So people fly up on a Monday morning, they work in Jo’burg, they come back on a Friday, and the family stays in our region in the Midlands.Alec Hogg:And for the schools you have to drive through central Maritzburg.Melanie Veness:You can hop into the highway. You don’t have to actually drive through central Maritzburg, but it’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. I’ve seen worse, that’s for sure.Alec Hogg:Okay. It’s not Hermanus.Melanie Veness:Not very many places are Hermanus.Alec Hogg:If the MK party’s leadership is widely perceived as compromised or administratively weak, why do you think a meaningful portion of voters will still see it as a credible alternative?Melanie Veness:Because they are positioning themselves as champions of the people. Because they go out and tell people they’ll put up social grants. I mean, if all you’ve got to look forward to, if your only access to an improvement in your life is an increase in your social grants, then you’re going to put your tick next to the person that’s going to give it to you. What would be the point of having anybody else govern?Alec Hogg:Bruce Ravenhill wants to know: Why are you not standing for mayor of Maritzburg? You have the track record.Melanie Veness:I’d probably get shot in the first week. I’m the most politically incorrect person you could find. I don’t think politics is for me. I won’t toe a party line ever. So I think that’s an issue in politics.Alec Hogg:When you say electrical tariffs, do you mean levies? Levies have become a new tax on those who are able to pay. Is this unfair, in your opinion? Christopher’s question.Melanie Veness:So there is a legal way of municipalities putting surcharges on electricity costs, which is a totally separate process to the tariff application process with the energy regulator.And there are a lot of municipalities that haven’t cottoned on to that, but they are able to put this in. It has to go through a process, but it doesn’t have to be approved by the regulator. So it is a way of municipalities increasing their electricity revenue without having to make application for it.Alec Hogg:When you drive through Pietermaritzburg towards Durban, on your left-hand side there used to be the big steel factory, PG Bison. And then a little bit further, Hulamin, the big aluminium factory. Tongaat. Now those two names are well known to people in this room — Steinhoff, Tongaat. Are those two still operating?Melanie Veness:Absolutely, yeah. So Hulamin is probably our biggest employer in Pietermaritzburg. They employ over 2,000 people. They’re amazingly stable. They’re an incredible company, processing aluminium.And then the other development that was undertaken by Steinhoff was a whole lot of light industrial, and yes, that’s still functioning. It’s going well.Alec Hogg:That’s interesting. So the biggest employer was 2,000 people. ArcelorMittal has just laid off 3,500 people in Newcastle, so you can imagine the impact on that much smaller town.Melanie Veness:Massive. Absolutely massive. I think everybody in Newcastle is in some way connected to metal.Alec Hogg:And they seem to have more political activism, given what we heard from Normandien Farms, which was the other big employer in the town. So KZN just seems like a mess. Come on, give us some hope.Melanie Veness:No, I think it’ll be quite fun. I mean, you guys must get really bored down here, isn’t it?Alec Hogg:Terribly bored, yeah.Melanie Veness:There’s whales and stuff. I mean, honestly.Alec Hogg:What do you think? “May you live in interesting times.”What did you think of the US ambassador’s opening up of the business accelerator programme by the US embassy? They haven’t given details yet, but given that the EU business accelerator programme, which you referred to, seems to be doing pretty well, the potential here could be significant.Melanie Veness:Look, I think that anybody that’s going to contribute to the creation of businesses and a more sustainable environment for South Africa is going to be welcomed. You can’t argue with anything the ambassador had to say. He’s not asking for unreasonable stuff.So we’re completely open to help from anybody who will give it to us, so that we’re able to grow businesses, create access for people that don’t have access, and encourage the youth.I think one of the things that I actually forgot to mention, that always sits really close to my heart, is our failure to be honest with young people. I had a couple of young chaps come and see me a little while ago. They said they were from the Black Management Forum at the university, and they asked if they could come and talk to me about something.I said absolutely. Then they said, “We’ve nearly qualified as lawyers. What is the chamber doing to ensure that there are jobs for us when we finish?” And I said, “That’s absolutely fascinating that you would ask me that question. Can I ask you a question?” And they said yes.And I said, “If I told you nobody wants to buy blue fluffy widgets, would you go and set up a factory and manufacture them?” So they said, “No, of course we wouldn’t.” So I said, “Before you went to university to acquire the skills that you now wish to sell in the open marketplace, did you establish whether anybody wanted to buy them?” And they both looked at me with horror and said, “Nobody’s ever said that to us.”And I said, that is actually the tragedy. You can’t go around telling people they can be anything they want to be in the world. That’s not how it works. We need to be more deliberate about encouraging young people to study things where there is demand in the marketplace, because we’ve got a lot of people who are qualified in professions that are never going to be absorbed into our economy. And that is tragic in a country where we have the unemployment levels we do.Alec Hogg:I was fascinated to hear when you spoke about critical thinking skills training. We’ve got a little unit now at BizNews where many years ago I did a mind course, a thinking skills course. Jeanette’s now got something together that she’s run. It’s actually in the book — if you ever look towards the back, it’s called Mind Lines. And it’s about critical thinking, and it’s helped us a lot at BizNews.It was interesting to see that this was something that you had within the chamber. Just unpack it for us exactly what it is that you do there.Melanie Veness:Well, I think the wonderful thing about the programmes that we run is that the team that runs them are incredibly perceptive and incredibly caring. And so they bring out quite a lot of honesty from the people they’re engaging with.Over time, you realise that there are certain things that you have to introduce to the programme that you never really anticipated in the beginning. And that was one of the things: realising that something that is so automatically passed on in some families is not passed on in every family. And you can’t expect people to know stuff that they’ve never learned. So that needs to be part of the work that we do. We realised that it needs to be part of the work that we do.And it’s been incredible. I think one of the most rewarding things for me was when this cohort of our last export accelerator businesses — one chap stood up, and his business has grown phenomenally, he runs a really, really great business — but what he said was that this programme has helped me to be a better businessman, a better husband and a better father. And that was really meaningful for us.Alec Hogg:I want to show you something interesting. Have a look at that. Those are the notes… well, okay, let’s go ahead. If you have a look at the notes, the way that I take notes, and have done throughout my career, is by using a skill that I learned from that thinking skills course however many years ago. And you can see some of it’s black, some of it’s blue, some of it’s red. It’s engaging the right side of the brain.Now, if I hadn’t learned that 50 years ago, I’m pretty sure that my career would have taken a very different path. So it’s a little thing like that — a little understanding — that can make a huge difference in somebody’s trajectory. And to the point you made a moment ago: how are people going to learn this otherwise?And yet we don’t invest time in something as simple as that, as just giving a leg up — or a hand up, rather than a handout. Have you got any examples of how this has benefited?Melanie Veness:Well, I can only tell you that those businesses… one lady stood up and said — she’s a chemist, a qualified chemist — that as a young person at home they only had the one Sunlight green soap, and they would cut some for dishes and some for washing and some for bathing, etc.So everything came from that green soap. And so she dreamed of developing a range of affordable cleaning products that were environmentally friendly and could be used by the community. And that’s what she developed. Her business has grown phenomenally. She stood up at the last Women in Business function and said, “I didn’t realise that I was running my business like a spaza shop.”So people are brilliant. They are incredibly entrepreneurial, but they don’t always have the knowledge because it hasn’t been shared with them. So I think that creating programmes like this, enabling people that are entrepreneurs to excel and to grow, is probably the most rewarding work ever.Alec Hogg:Warren Buffett says accounting is the language of business, and it’s scary how few entrepreneurs have even a rudimentary understanding of accounting. Maybe just a rudimentary start could make a huge difference.Last question, Mel, is from John Endres. He’s the chief executive of the IRR, the most prestigious think tank in South Africa, so you must know it’s going to be a good question. Is the eThekwini turnaround real? Is that a model for Pietermaritzburg?Melanie Veness:It depends on who you talk to. If I talk to my colleague in the chamber in Durban, there’s been very little change. I’m going to have to say no. There’s a lot of talk. I don’t know that it’s translated into anything really actionable.Alec Hogg:So what are you going to leave us with for a little bit of hope?Melanie Veness:Well, I think I’m extremely hopeful. There’s lots happening. You can come and find it. I think what I want to leave you with is that every South African that envisions the country that we were promised in 1994 has an obligation to stand up and contribute to it.So my invitation to you is: support your local chambers. If you can’t do it yourself, at least contribute. You’ve all got staff, you’ve all got areas of influence. Engage with people, understand where they’re at, and make a contribution to building our country. Thank you.Alec Hogg:Thank you, Melanie.

BNC#8: Melanie Veness Q&A - Broken governance, business fightback, and a city’s last chance...

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