GAUTENG
COMMENT, by Pete Bower
MAGAZINE
HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLOT PROFITABLE
Vol 16 No 9
September 2015
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FRONT COVER
. for sale under
Clivias being grown
nursery conditions. Learn how you can
make money from these favourites
on page 12
Self-sufficiency
F
rom the sanctimonious democratic pedestal of the New South
Africa it is perhaps a bit perverse to look back on the Seventies and
Eighties with any great fondness but, in one respect at least, the
hard-hitting sanctions era had an unintended beneficial consequence for
South Africa: it made us self-sufficient in many respects. Uneconomical, yes, but selfsufficient nonetheless.
There can be no doubt that the sanctions years produced a burst of technological
innovation in South African industry. Take our arms industry: cut off from purchases of
armaments, aircraft and many other components that the rest of the world thought
might have a military application, scientists and engineers rolled up their sleeves
throughout South Africa and developed what was needed to keep the military supplied
and effective. Armoured cars, military lorries, cannon, helicopters and much more
rolled off production lines in their hundreds, often uneconomically, it must be said, but
usually ideally-suited to the rigours of African bush warfare.
But civil life, and commerce and industry, also gained by the growth of a much more
diverse manufacturing sector necessitated by the sanctions era. Because there was a
threat that South African heavy transport might be denied engines for its vehicles, a
large engine manufacturing plant was set up in a depressed area of the Western Cape
named Atlantis, from where thousands of engines, built to only two standardised
designs, powered every heavy vehicle imaginable, usually quite reliably, if not in the
most modern fuel efficient manner and, because of their ubiquity, with generally
readily-available spares. The beneficial effect of such employment on the community of
Atlantis was well-recorded, with many families having been lifted out of grinding
poverty to something resembling a decent middle-class lifestyle.
At that stage, South Africa also had a fledgling ship building industry, with quite
sophisticated small ships being built at Durban, and luxury yachts at Cape Town.
Only the latter remains, shipbuilding at Durban having been successfully killed off by
high steel prices, high labour costs and a lack of government support.
At one time South Africa was the worldwide centre of a highly sophisticated stainless
steel tank container manufacturing industry, which not only used South Africandeveloped stainless steel in large quantities but which employed hundreds of highlyqualified specialist welders, not to mention ultrasonic weld inspectors and other highly
trained personnel. Cheap Far East manufacture and a lack of government support saw
that industry collapse locally.
South Africa's leadership iin the field of narrow-gauge railway engineering was widely
acknowledged. Spoornet's world-class Koedoespoort workshops and heavy engineering
companies such as Guestro Wheels and Union Carriage & Wagon in Nigel built and
maintained hundreds of locomotives, carriages and wagons. Now we can't even buy
locos from overseas without getting the height specifications wrong.
Much has been written about the collapse of the clothing and textile industry.
Nowadays underpants and socks come from China or India, jeans and shirts from
Mauritius and Madagascar. And don't ask too many questions about the child labour or
slave wages with which they were produced.
Last month I ordered a new pair of spectacles. They took a month to arrive because, I
was told, South Africa no longer has a glass-spectacle lens manufacturing industry, this
work now being outsourced to a factory in Germany.
Even in the field of foodstuffs surprisingl 䁱