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- Over the Easter weekend, the once famed tourist hub of Durban was a shell of its former self.
- Residents listed crime, a dirty inner city, and polluted seawater as reasons why the city is on the skids.
- In the series On The Road, News24 is traversing the country to gauge South Africans' feelings ahead of the elections.
Durban. Once, the name elicited pictures of packed beaches along the Golden Mile. Surfers charging waves in the Bay of Plenty. Art Deco buildings steaming in the subtropical heat, their Edwardian and Victorian counterparts lending a bit of old-world grandiosity. A masala of Zulu and Indian culture.
For many, Durban was a city of opportunity, the go-to city for shopping, vacations and schools. Over an ordinary weekend, the beachfront would be bursting at the seams, and the city would be a hive of activity. But now?
Chances are you're thinking of polluted seawater. And crooked politicians. And violence. The town is only a shadow of what it used to be. From Surf City to Surf Shitty.
Perhaps then, it isn't a surprise that News24 found little activity on the famed beachfront on Monday – a balmy public holiday. The beaches should have been packed. Restaurants and hangouts should have been buzzing. But they weren't.
Around 09:00, the mercury already well into the higher twenties, there were some people jogging along the promenade. Hardly 20 people risked getting into the water, with about the same amount on the litter-strewn beach.
Not a single surfer among the waves. But, to be fair, with a cross-shore wind and little swell, the conditions were far from ideal.
On land, however, a Durbanite who has been surfing these beaches for over 60 years reflected on the state of North Beach in Durban, and came to the conclusion that what used to be the Golden Mile in Durban, lost its lustre a long time ago.
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He identified himself only as "JJ" and called on those at the helm to clean up their act and the beachfront to revive tourism in Central Durban.
"They must clean up the beachfront, organise a civic clean-up, and take the town block by block, and then Durban will be good again," JJ said.
JJ said the city started deteriorating after the 2010 World Cup.
JJ added:
He said the Covid-19 pandemic was "the final nail in the coffin".
"All the overseas tourists stopped coming in 2020, but this is the quietest Easter in many years," he said.
JJ, a former surfing teacher and volunteer, admitted that his business was no longer profitable.
"My business has been flat and broke since 2020; 90% of the money I made was German money, and there are no tourists because they blocked Durban and marked it as a dangerous city. There is no coming right until they clean up the city. Crime must go," JJ said.
Also, according to JJ, the eThekwini municipality has not done anything for the city since 1994.
"It's just been a downward spiral, blocked sewers, smelly drains, crumbling infrastructure."
"Happy Easter Holidays" read one of the sand sculptures 25-year-old Emanuel Majozi was making on the beach. Donations from passersby are his income. More people, more money.
"It's an honest living, because I don't like to steal," he said.
"Durban is cool. But there are lots of criminals.
"In one or two years, maybe things will change."
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Rudi van Eden is a parking attendant at North Beach.
"It's completely dead," he said.
"Everybody knows that Durban's seawater is polluted, so coming here is a waste of time. It has affected us big time; your regular customers don't come around anymore, so you don't make the money you used to make," Van Eden said.
Van Eden said that his income had been halved since news broke in 2022 that Durban beaches were polluted.
He said he expected things to worsen.
By midday, there were a few more people milling about, but still not what you would expect. There are a few rickshaws around, but in the wind, they're not wearing their traditional headdresses. And guided Segway tours seem to have taken over as the preferred mode of promenade transport.
Spha Cele is pushing his red cart containing cool drinks and snacks along the promenade near the Pirates Lifesaving Club, with its mural of a skull and fishes.
How's business?
"Hayi, it's a bad one. It's a bad one. The whole weekend, it's a bad one," he says.
"After the pandemic, the Covid, ja, it ruins lots of things.
"Even now, the tourists are still not coming here. I'm sure they're still scared about the pandemic because it still flies around. But the business, things are coming slowly, seriously.
"No tourists are coming. Even [if] they're coming, they can't buy, because the prices are still high.
"It's not clean; nobody wants to come to a place which is dirty, uh-uh."
Asked if he intends to stay in Durban, he says: "Yes, I'll keep my business here, because I still have the hope that it would come back."
The Covid-19 pandemic obviously put a pause on tourism. It wasn't the only disaster that hit Durban. The city bore the brunt of the July 2021 unrest. Incidentally, the person whose incarceration sparked the violence, corruption-accused former president Jacob Zuma, is grinning at motorists all along the M4 from his fledgling MK Party's posters.
Major floods in April 2022 made an already dire situation worse. The floods damaged water infrastructure and wastewater treatment works, threatening water supply. After the floods, 80% of the drinking water network was out of order. The City's response has been questionable.
But perhaps the biggest disaster that has befallen Durban is governance. Former eThekwini mayor, the ANC's Zandile Gumede, is standing trial on corruption charges for a R320-million waste collection tender issued during her tenure as mayor, along with 21 others.
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Things haven't gone much better under the ANC-EFF coalition, led by Mayor Mxolisi Kaunda of the ANC.
In 2023, the Auditor-General released a scathing report, showing that the City has racked up R4.8 billion in irregular expenditure since 2018.
Meanwhile, it only spent 6.59% of its budget on repairs and maintenance, while total capital expenditure spend was a mere 5.14%. The city was losing more than half of its water supply.
The AG also flagged that councillors and officials failed to report family members doing business with the municipality, wastewater treatment plants with no licences, and continued abuse and flouting of supply chain procedures.
The 2024 edition didn't make for better reading, with similar issues raised. The report showed that R3.6 billion was written off due to irregular expenditure, supply chain officials participated in processes relating to contracts where family members, partners and associates had an interest in and a lack of consequence management for poor performance reporting, project management and transgressions of relevant legislation.
A drive through the inner city will show the effects of this mismanagement. The streets aren't clean. Most buildings can do with a fresh coat of paint. It just does not look like a thriving central business district.
You'll mostly see posters of the ANC, EFF and MK Party on the poles here. But head up to Umhlanga Rocks, which is cleaner and the modern buildings in better shape, and you'll find DA, ActionSA and even FF Plus posters. Then, when you arrive in Phoenix, posters of the Minority Front and Democratic Liberal Congress will greet you from the poles.
Interestingly, several of the people News24 approached, while friendly enough, did not want to talk on camera or be named. Few people volunteered criticism of their political leaders, unlike the other towns we have visited. There was a caginess in the air, far from the happy-go-lucky beach town vibe Durban once had as its reputation. After all, in KwaZulu-Natal, politics is a contact sport, and the injuries are often fatal.
By Monday late afternoon, the North Beach front, in the vicinity of the amphitheatre, was the expected hive of activity.
Three colourful, ornate chariots, a couple of stories high, were the centres of attraction for the annual Hare Krishna festival of Ratha Yatra, or Festival of Chariots.
Balaram Das, coordinator for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) congregational development, said the festival is held in different parts of the country – including Johannesburg, Soweto and Cape Town - at different times of the year.
"This is the period of time that it is normally held in Durban. One of the reasons for that is that Durban is a hive of activity during the Easter weekend. So, the advantage of this is that the mercy of the Lord will be available to much more people than it would have been at any other time of the year."
"We are also surprised about the turnout. But what we have found is that the turnout to our festival itself, is quite large. But there is a decrease in the tourism in the area. Generally, along this promenade you have a lot of tourists walking by. And as they walk by, they are attracted to the festival. But the turnout from the tourist side is much lower."
Scores of people pull the chariots along the promenade.
But what is its significance?
Das explains: "The Lord, on the three chariots, are taken through the streets of Durban. And the significance of it is that many people may not be able to take the blessing of the Lord, but the Lord is so merciful, that the Lord is able to go to the people, because there are many people who don't get a chance to go to places of worship.
"So, this is the blessings that is being given to anybody, and everybody, irrespective of religion, male or female, financial status. It's freely available, the mercy of the Lord, to everyone who wants to take advantage of it."
