Letters | The shrinking bay

The bay is the heart of Durban. If it stops beating, Durban will die. It would become just another seaside resort like Balito or Margate.

The port is important not only to the city but to the country. It is the biggest and busiest container port in the country, handling 60% of the country’s cargo and ranks as one of the busiest ports on the African continent. But the harbour has faced challenging times in recent years.

Systemic, unbridled corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency at Transnet have taken its toll on the efficient operation of the harbour. Severe congestion made it one of the worst container ports in the world. Ships have to wait for days, if not weeks, at the outer anchorage for a berth in the port.

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Congestion became so bad that Transnet has been forced to hand over the running of Pier No 2 to a private company from the Philippines, International Container Terminal Inc (ICTSI) In recent months, there has been some improvement under the new Transport Minister Barbara Creecy. It took a woman and the private sector to make a turn the port around. Though new cranes at the container terminal and widening of the Bayhead Road have eased congestion and improved effiency, it was still not enough to bring the port back to its glory days.

The port needed more land to handle the increasing container traffic. So Transnet came up with another plan: expand the port. Transnet plans to do what it did many years ago at Bayhead: reclaim land from the bay and widen the Point area for another container terminal.

It will be good for the port and business but not for the marine life in the bay. The bay will get smaller. The bay was so much part of my boyhood days.

As a boy I roamed the breadth and width of the bay, walking, wading, swimming, trudging in the mud and rowing in my leaky canoe, catching fish and crabs. I saw, too, how convict labour was used to chop down the mangroves to reclaim land from the bay, all in the name of progress, to build the container terminal. Now only 15 hectares of the original 440 hectare mangrove swamp remain. I feel sad but relieved that Transnet has left a little bit of the original mangrove swamp at Bayhead for the mud skippers, shrimps, crabs and for my boyhood memory.

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