Gqeberha’s third deadly blow: Deindustrialisation knocking on the door again?

I was still in primary school in 1985 when Gqeberha (then Port Elizabeth) suffered what felt like the first slow, mortal wound to its soul. Ford Motor Company locked the gates of Ford House for the last time, the assembly lines at Struandale fell silent, and the rhythm that had given the city its heartbeat simply stopped.The harbour was still there. The factories were still standing. People still woke up every morning. But something essential had died. It wasn’t a dramatic collapse, it was more like watching a strong man slowly bleed out: each week another job gone, another family tightening its belt, another small business closing its doors.If the 10th plague of Egypt was the death of the firstborn, this was the plague of unemployment. It went from house to house through the northern areas of the city, knocking without discrimination. Few families escaped untouched.Mine certainly didn’t.My late father was among those who suddenly found themselves without work. Like thousands of others, he spent months, then years, joining the unemployment queues outside the Eben Dönges Building, hoping there was still room for one more pair of willing hands. As a child I didn’t understand economics or industrial policy. What I did understand was what unemployment does to a man. I watched him lose not only his income but something far more precious: the dignity of providing for his family. The confidence drained out of him little by little. The spark that had defined him dimmed beneath rejection, uncertainty and depression.He eventually found stable work again, and for that we were grateful. But he was never quite the same man. Prolonged unemployment leaves scars that don’t show on the skin.Yet the city endured. The democratic transition brought a measure of hope, investment returned, production picked up, and for a moment it felt as though Port Elizabeth might recover.It was only a reprieve. The second blow came when trade liberalisation exposed industries that had long been protected, and the textile factories began disappearing one by one. This time it was my mother who received the news no worker wants to hear.Looking back, 1985 wasn’t the year Gqeberha died. It was the year the doctors stopped talking about a temporary illness and realised the patient had a chronic disease. Today, four decades later, that patient is back in intensive care.Many still speak of Gqeberha as though it’s going through a rough patch. Those of us who grew up here know better. We’ve seen this film before: factories running below capacity, young people leaving in waves, skilled artisans disappearing, the central business district decaying, and the quiet despair that settles over a community when work becomes the exception rather than the norm.The wind that blows through Algoa Bay has always carried the smell of salt and diesel. Increasingly, it carries something else: the uneasy feeling that history is repeating itself, and that Gqeberha may be about to suffer its third deadly blow.If Ford’s departure was the first great blow to the city’s industrial economy, and the collapse of the textile sector the second, Nelson Mandela Bay now faces a far more complex and potentially decisive challenge. Unlike the earlier blows, which each had a single dominant cause, today’s threat is unfolding on several fronts at once. Together, these forces risk pushing the city beyond a tipping point from which recovery may prove far more difficult than in the past.One of those pressures comes from the rapid transformation of the global automotive industry. As manufacturers around the world invest heavily in electric vehicles, advanced manufacturing and new supply chains, South Africa risks being left behind unless it adapts with similar urgency.At the same time, decades of industrial policy have allowed the region to become dangerously dependent on a single sector. Rather than building a broader manufacturing base capable of absorbing economic shocks, government policy concentrated ever more heavily on automotive production, creating the kind of industrial monoculture that ultimately contributed to the decline of Detroit.Compounding these structural weaknesses is the steady deterioration of the city itself. Manufacturers can weather economic downturns, but they cannot indefinitely operate with unreliable water supplies, crumbling roads, failing sewerage systems and a municipality that no longer inspires confidence. Infrastructure is not merely a public service; it is the foundation upon which every industrial investment depends. Once that foundation begins to crumble, businesses do not leave because they have lost affection for the city. They leave because they can no longer rely on it to function.That is why this moment feels so ominous. In 1985 the machines stopped. Through the 2000s, the rich network of textile, footwear and manufacturing sectors that once made the Metro a true industrial hub that once meant this city didn’t have to bet everything on one industry, gone. Today, the danger is that the entire ecosystem that supports industry – water, roads, electricity, ports, governance and public confidence – is failing all at once. The gradual failure of the city itself. A city can survive losing a factory, or even an industry. What it struggles to survive is the loss of the conditions that make any industry possible. For the first time, it’s fair to ask whether there is no coming back from this one.Observers have warned that Gqeberha is “shutting down in front of everyone’s eyes”, with evidence of industrial decline stretching from the city centre to the factories around Kariega.And now the most alarming sign of all: Volkswagen, the last great industrial anchor of the old Port Elizabeth economy, is openly warning that its future here is uncertain. Reports suggest the Kariega plant could close if the government fails to fix the infrastructure and governance conditions that long-term investment requires. Parliament has already called the prospect a national industrial crisis.The prospect of a third blow hasn’t gone unnoticed. Concerned citizens, business leaders and civic organisations are finally asking the question that should have been asked years ago: how do we stop Gqeberha’s decline before it becomes irreversible? The Nelson Mandela Bay Civil Society Coalition has announced an economic summit later this year, and that effort deserves recognition. A city cannot solve problems it won’t discuss.But goodwill isn’t enough. If history teaches us anything, it is that cities rarely talk themselves back to prosperity. South Africa has become remarkably good at convening conferences, summits and task teams that produce glossy reports and group photographs, while the factories keep closing. The conversation too often becomes the destination rather than the starting point.There’s a harder concern beneath this, one woven into the political culture of the Bay. Port Elizabeth was a great centre of resistance to apartheid, and that legacy deserves respect. But every liberation movement inherits ideas suited to one era that become obstacles in the next. Under apartheid, business was reasonably viewed through the lens of exploitation, and organised labour built an adversarial relationship with employers that was entirely understandable at the time. Strong unions such as Numsa became central actors in the political life of the region, shaping both workplace relations and the broader public conversation about economics. The question now is whether that instinct still serves a society trying to attract investment rather than resist it.Cities don’t become prosperous by defeating business. They become prosperous by creating conditions under which businesses compete to invest. This requires a subtle but profound change in mindsetMuch of our economic thinking still runs on what might be called Transformation Through Redistribution, the idea that existing wealth must first be shared more fairly before new wealth is built. The intention is noble. The problem is that redistribution cannot distribute wealth that doesn’t yet exist, and it has become something closer to an operating system than a policy, quietly shaping which investments proceed and which risks investors are willing to take, regardless of which strategy document sits on top of it.A new approach: We should refuse to end on a full stopWhat if Gqeberha pursued Transformation Through Expansion instead? Not “how do we divide today’s pie more fairly”, but “how do we bake a pie large enough that everyone’s slice grows?” Redistribution treats business as a resource to extract from. Expansion treats it as the engine that creates what can later be shared – the jobs, the apprenticeships, the supplier contracts, the rates base that funds social programmes in the first place.Detroit offers a useful lesson. Its recovery began only once the city accepted it had to become attractive again to investors, manufacturers, universities and skilled workers rather than simply preserve what remained. That recovery has been incomplete and uneven, but it proves the principle: cities recover when they become places investment wants to live.Gqeberha still has the deep-water harbour, the automotive expertise, the engineering skills, the universities, the renewable energy potential. These are not the assets of a dying city. They are the assets of a city waiting for permission to grow again.If the coalition’s summit is to be a turning point rather than another talk shop, its task isn’t producing another strategy document. It’s asking the question few in South Africa are prepared to ask: what if the greatest obstacle to recovery isn’t a lack of plans, but the philosophy through which every plan gets interpreted? Because if the diagnosis is wrong, no prescription will cure the patient.If 1985 was the first wound and the collapse of textiles the second, the third deadly blow may not be the closure of another factory. It may be our refusal to abandon the ideas that made that collapse inevitable. DM