Janine Myburgh, President of the Cape Chamber of Commerce
Dr Ruben Richards, CEO of the Cape Chamber of Commerce
Mzo Tshaka, Deputy Chairperson of the Black Management Forum, Western
Cape
Bjorn Harmse of the Afrikanse Handels Instituut
Chris Schereka of the Western Cape Business Opportunities Forum
Members of the Mayoral Committee
Members of business organisations
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Good morning, goeie môre, molweni, as-salaam alaikum, shalom.
Thank you for joining us here as part of our continuing engagement with business organisations.
In many ways, the economy has been front and centre of national debate in the past few days.
We have found ourselves arguing about the definitional criteria for what constitutes a recession, with observers remarking on ‘technical’ versus
‘broader’ criteria.
The compact between organised labour and business, especially in the mining sector, seems to be suffering from a lack of trust or the ability to compromise.
And credit agencies seem ready to downgrade our sovereign credit rating, thereby dealing a massive blow to our national investment potential, especially for new markets or new entrants who are unfamiliar with our dynamics.
Indeed, global business sources have begun to talk about the ‘sluggish’
South African economy, a slow-moving beast trapped in its own web.

I have followed this debate with much interest, especially since Nigeria overtook South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy.
We wrung our hands in South Africa, shocked at the prospect of losing our treasured pedestal as the continent’s economic superpower.
Our arrogance was only matched by our complacency.
I have been to Lagos, the business heartland of Nigeria.
I have experienced the lack of infrastructure, both hard and soft.
We have all these things and more in South Africa and yet we still cannot generate a ‘buzz’ in international markets.
I think we have yet to realise that it is not enough to have assets on your balance sheet and then sit back and wait for the world to happen to you.
That is not how competition works in the 21 st Century.
The private sector, whether a pension fund or a hedge fund, whether a multinational producer or global services company, considers the factors of a market, weighs them and then moves on or puts money down.
They consider business factors, not sentiment.
They look at numbers, not excuses.
They want returns, not red tape.
They want profits, not inefficiencies.
We have realised that in the City of Cape Town.
While we may not be business people ourselves, we understand what business requires from government.
We know that you need to be proactive, not believe in magic.
And so we have considered our investor profile and our competitive advantages.
We have looked at our profile for the domestic business market and our attractiveness for the international marketplace and done a gap analysis.

The City, unfortunately, cannot be uncoupled from the sovereign credit rating which puts a ceiling on our credit rating, even though it is the highest in the country.
That is something we can have limited impact on when people consider us as an investment destination.
But what we can control, what we can influence: those things are what we have taken action on.
For foreign and domestic businesses, while there are some key differences, the profile of services required is largely the same: can the City deliver hard infrastructure and the requisite level of service that the customer-driven world expects and demands?
I want to mention two major investments: two services and two interventions that we are making to drive economic growth in Cape Town.
In terms of investment, for the past few years, and in the years over the medium-term, we have placed major resources into the Integrated Rapid
Transport (IRT) system that is creating a network of multi-modal transport for all
Capetonians to link them to economic opportunities and to create the network for economic goods and services to flow through.
This is important: you cannot have an attractive economy if there is no mobility of people, goods or services.
Our multi-billion investment is transforming Cape Town and is creating the hard infrastructure links between places and people that allows business to come together as part of one network.
And we have put hundreds of millions of rands into our broadband project in order to link the entire metro with fibre-optic cables.
The model for this project started out as an exercise in creating efficiencies for the municipality’s telecommunication costs.
It has now moved to create the kind of data space that service providers can leverage and enter the market in providing data services to consumers.
This broadband project, which we view as a public utility, is therefore increasing our competitiveness while at the same time encouraging market competition.
In a few years’ time, we hope to connect with the undersea cables off our
West Coast and revolutionise data speeds in this part of the world.

At the level of services, we have an exciting approach to investment incentives as a local government and have now rolled out our package of hard and soft incentive measures to Atlantis, where 23 companies have made use of them already.
These include paying mixed-use electricity charges at 2012 rates and the waiving of development contribution fees.
This programme has brought investment to Atlantis and has allowed us a platform to consider the further roll-out of the model elsewhere to complement our city-wide soft incentives programme.
In terms of our city-wide initiatives, I am pleased to announce that our new
Economic Areas Management Programme (ECAMP) is ready to use.
This web-based tool allows us to track 70 business and industrial nodes across the city by analysing their current performance and long-term potential.
It draws on numerous sources, including rates information, crime figures, complaint responses and much more to build up an area profile that traces what stage of development an area is in.
It utilises a variety of open-source data to identify local-barriers to investment opportunities and has been reviewed by leading experts from both the private and academic sectors.
Indeed, it comes on the back of our innovative open data policy which aims to make a whole range of City information sources open to the public – a first in South Africa.
I urge all of you to engage with our current public participation process on the policy.
The ECAMP platform has been well-received by a major financial institution, the National Treasury and the World Bank.
In a data-driven age, this kind of analytical tool will amplify the information upon which you make your investment decisions and could lead to an even more sophisticated property sector that sources all possible data streams to drive the market forward.
And at the level of interventions, we are at an advanced stage of our fixed asset planning, having already identified provisional City assets in terms of land and facilities that we want to dispose of.
While I cannot go into the details now, I urge you to watch out for some exciting City prospects that will be coming onto the market soon.

And then, let me introduce you to Tim Harris, the new investment facilitator in my office.
Tim has been appointed to attract domestic and international investment to
Cape Town and to be a direct point of contact for business with the City.
If there is something you need as business, then Tim is your person.
In conclusion, let me say that the recipe for economic success is not a magical secret.
One part of the mixture is government knowing what it has to do and doing it well.
But the other part if for business to live up to its end of the bargain, which we know you are fully capable of doing with our partnerships for urban regeneration.
Over the past decade, we have learnt a few lessons in applying this model to a range of different challenges in the city.
The first successful collaboration was in our CBD where we helped start the
Cape Town Partnership (CTP) with the specific aim of arresting and reversing urban decay in partnership with business.
The additional funds raised by our partnership taxation model helped turn the
CBD around and has made it a vibrant and dynamic place with desirable property prices and a lively urban culture.
Since then, our modelling has advanced under the Mayoral Urban
Regeneration Programme (MURP).
Operating soon after I came into office in 2011, MURP seeks to apply the lessons of the CTP and other experiments and push them even further to try new things under expansive partnership schemes relying on innovative taxation methods.
The 13 areas that are part of the MURP have already established Area
Coordination Teams (ACTs) which comprise the city, business and civil society partners.
Perhaps the greatest example of how far we have come is the Greater
Tygerberg Partnership (GTP), which is also affected by a special ratings area but goes further to regenerate and reinvigorate our secondary CBD and surrounding residential areas.

This model goes further to rely on seed funds from the City, additional contracted services from additional rates and the interventions of business, residents associations, civil society and the universities in driving change in a dynamic urban partnership that is backed by the City and its financing models but is driven by business and academia.
But as much as we partner together to transform our urban environment, it is also the role of the private sector to take risks, to expand operations and to try new things without a safety blanket or a map from government.
Government cannot create growth; it can assist it.
I think once we realise the roles of each actor in this unique partnership, we will have a basis to move forward and to address the insecurities that plague us and prevent us from maximising our potential.
In our city, we have accepted our role as government.
We ask all of you to accept your role and continue to work with us as partners.
In so doing, we will make progress possible together.
Thank you, baie dankie, enkosi.