The closure of the local CNA, after Dunns and the Telkom retail outlet, has raised for me the spectre of economic decline in Grahamstown. What might close next?
The closure of the local CNA, after Dunns and the Telkom retail outlet, has raised for me the spectre of economic decline in Grahamstown. What might close next?
Yet there is no need to panic. In part, the CNA closure may be the result of national trends: the changing patterns of media consumption and a lack of focus make it a wonder than any CNA stores survive.
Telkom is under pressure to cut costs and every time I visited its very clean and friendly and now-closed outlet there were few other customers.
That the closures were all in the same part of town should be a clue that something else is happening. Jeff Peires, noted local historian, points out that the stores in the High Street are also subject to what he calls Third World Blight, as well as the sucking in of business by Peppergrove Mall.
This is not unique to Grahamstown. Malls everywhere attract business away from main street shops. And location is clearly important for shops. Peires has also pointed out to me that the Steers restaurant, for example, seems to have flourished simply by moving a bit further up High Street towards the university.
Some of the newer places in town, such as the sushi and fish and chips outlets, opened at the Pepper Grove Mall. The closures remain worrying evidence of Grahamstown’s general lack of economic dynamism, however.
Despite being the home of one of the country’s finest universities, several pricey elite private schools, and the National Arts Festival, as well as being a tourist destination, the city just plods along. There are a few fine eateries, it’s true. Liquor stores flourish, and restaurants and pubs come and go, testimony to student demand. However, just about the only new feature of the cityscape are the numerous new blocks of flats and townhouses designed to provide accommodation, mainly for students.
There is little productive activity, a legacy of Grahamstown’s historical development, perhaps. The major retail chains even ship in bread by truck rather than make it here. The chimerical Woolworths food store is illustrative of another problem.
Ever since I arrived in Grahamstown I have been waiting for a Woolworths food store to open. Anthea Garman, my colleague in the School of Journalism and Media Studies, tells me that she and her husband were told when they arrived at Rhodes that one would be opening soon, and Anthea has been here a lot longer than I have. It looks like I may be in for a long wait.
So, like other Grahamstown residents I shop at Woolworths in PE. I miss Woolies’ range of quality fresh vegetables and salad ingredients, as well as other groceries. And at least some of the money I spend in PE could have helped create jobs in an expanded Grahamstown Woolworths store. I prefer to buy food locally, and would not bother to stop in PE to visit the Woolworths store there if I could avoid it.
Though geographical monopolies do push up the price of some things, which I would prefer to buy in PE, it doesn’t always, and I’ve found some Grahamstown goods and services to be markedly cheaper than in PE. I do feel some satisfaction supporting local farming and other business by buying local, as long as the price difference is not punitive.
So, for example, I use Springvale olive oil and table olives because they are produced in the Eastern Cape. The quality is equal to what is available from the Western Cape, which in turn surpasses that of some European olive products, and it strikes me as strange that our local Pick n Pay stocks olive oil from Spain and Greece, but not from our own region.
I also try to buy some of what I need from the Farmers’ Market on Saturday, and from our own local fresh vegetable suppliers in Pepper Grove Mall. The money I spend on local goods by choice is a form of what in Black Economic Empowerment legislation is called “preferential procurement”.
The government’s preferential procurement regulations now require local content as well as black empowerment, because previous procurement regulations allowed business to go to BEE firms which simply imported goods to the detriment of domestic manufacturing. However, local in this legislation means not imported or “domestic”.
The kind of preferential procurement that would boost jobs and business in Grahamstown is local in a specific sense of being from Grahamstown or from somewhere in Cacadu perhaps. Is it compatible with the legislation, I wonder?
Makana Municipality or the university, for instance, could comply with preferential procurement regulations by buying from a BEE-compliant company somewhere else in South Africa. Clearly, our major institutions should have voluntary procurement policies that encourage buying locally wherever possible. Not only charity begins at home.
