PORTNET HAS finalised its recommendations for the new container terminal development in Durban and will present them to the Portnet Exco before the end of this month, after which the matter will go to the Transnet board. The process will be complete within two months.
This is the latest news from Durban port manager, Bax Nomvete, who was reacting to criticism in local media that Portnet had been procrastinating over the new container terminal development in Durban.
According to recent reports, key players in business and shipping are becoming impatient with Portnet's delay in disclosing their recommendations. This follows the completion of a drawn-out one-year Integrated Environmental Management process which resulted in a consensus report expressing Durban's need for a new container terminal together with its preferred siting within the port. This report emphatically rejected the sandbank option.
It was anticipated that Portnet would forward its own comments along with the IEM study to the Transnet Board for approval and final decision by the Minister for Public Enterprises, Stella Sigcau.
Refuting suggestions that the matter had been placed on a back-burner while awaiting the development of a new port in the Eastern Cape and the Maputo Corridor, Nomvete told FTW that Portnet had sent a copy of its recommendations on the matter to the Durban Chamber of Commerce & Industry. I don't know why some local advisory committee members (LAC) including the business representative (Hans Beier) should now accuse us of not being open and transparent. The LAC shipping representative, Peter Grobler, is reported to have said that Portnet had an obligation to make its recommendation public.
It is no secret that I favour the sandbank option, but our discussions were democratic, he said. My committee's first choice is Salisbury Island, followed by the sandbank area. But this depends on the navy being relocated, and no-one knows where they would be prepared to go, or for that matter who would pay for their removal or even low long it would take. According to Nomvete it will not be possible for the container terminal and the navy to share Salisbury Island. He said there were already complications because SACD and Portnet were sharing the existing terminal area, adding that the sandbank area was the only empty area in the harbour confines which did not involve interfering with anyone else. It won't be the whole sandbank anyway, and there is no high-rise development, so no-one will even notice anything, he said.
Environmentalists have reacted by asking whether those groups who took part in one of Durban's most drawn-out integrated invironmental impact studies had wasted their time. Why did we bother if Portnet was going to make up its own mind anyway? is their response.
Early in the study Portnet objected to environmentalist suggestions that it was working to its own agenda and that the IEM exercise was window-dressing. On several occasions they threatened to withdraw from the process and only continued after being given assurances that the process was totally transparent with no decisions having already been taken.
By Terry Hutson
