How many times can the same industrial ambition be announced as a new opportunity? More than a few, in South Africa’s case.

For three decades, successive initiatives have promised to build a broader industrial economy around Saldanha’s port. The latest source of optimism is a 25-year lease agreement signed this month between Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA) and Freeport Saldanha. It comes as an R8.9 billion investment programme is now being undertaken to restore the Sishen-Saldanha railway corridor that was first opened 50 years ago in 1976.

But this raises a familiar question not unique to Saldanha. Why are arrangements needed to realise the very real industrial potential of a highly prospective part of the country still being put in place after more than 30 years of discussion?

During the 1990s, the West Coast Investment Initiative sought to stimulate investment, exports, and sustainable employment around existing infrastructure and resources. Industrial development around the port was central to the proposition, not a subsequent addition to the mineral export facility.

The ambition has a sound geographical basis. Saldanha’s deep natural harbour, an established mineral-export railway, and adjoining industrial land offer a foundation for manufacturing, marine repair and offshore energy services, as well as the shipment of ore.

Saldanha Steel served as an anchor project. Commissioned in 1998, the steelworks gave that ambition substantial physical expression. However, turning ambition into reality was perhaps more challenging than initially anticipated.

Missing link

We all know that ambitions don’t always materialise into activity. No doubt, dozens of meetings were had, plans discussed, and promises made in the following years. By October 2009, that study was describing the proposed development zone as the “missing link” that would connect the surrounding industries and harbours. It identified opportunities in oil-and-gas services, ship repair, steel processing, and renewable-energy manufacturing. Numerous studies had identified opportunities, it observed. “However, something needs to be done to exploit these opportunities.”

Seventeen years later, that sentence remains uncomfortable reading.

The Saldanha Industrial Development Zone (IDZ) was formally launched four years later, in October 2013, by then-president Jacob Zuma.

At the ceremony, Zuma said the plans “must also be coordinated with Transnet in maximising the capability of the Port of Saldanha”. Coordination between the zone and the port was therefore recognised as essential from the outset.

That wording is echoed in Freeport Saldanha chief executive Xola Sithole’s announcement this month that the zone could “now offer investors one coordinated package of industrial land and TNPA-facilitated access to port facilities”. An associated R6.9 billion investment pipeline is also under consideration.

This is not to say industrial development did not follow the launch of the Saldanha IDZ in 2013. It did. A Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition (dtic) presentation to Parliament in June this year recorded 137 hectares of developed land and approximately R1.157 billion in cumulative departmental funding disbursements.

While it may sound significant, the zone’s broader industrial ambition remains unfulfilled. Saldanha Steel’s mothballing in 2020 also demonstrated that establishing an industrial operation and sustaining its competitiveness were different achievements.

The dtic’s performance table for the end of the 2025/26 financial year recorded 16 operational investments at Saldanha, valued at R268 million, and 107 active jobs. Elsewhere, the presentation identified R4 billion in committed investments requiring access to port land and enabling infrastructure.

So what is the problem? Why is the ambition not being realised? Unfortunately, it is a story South Africans are all too familiar with.

Uncertainty

The same presentation documented delayed leasing arrangements, misaligned mandates between port and zone, and fragmented authority over landside and waterside infrastructure. And, of course, there is the almost total collapse of Transnet to take into consideration. These problems have created sustained uncertainty, slowed execution, and threatened the bankability of projects.

October’s agreement is intended to address part of that problem. The agreement may be genuine progress. But progress must be measured against the time already lost, not merely against the absence of an agreement last month. Land, port access, and institutional coordination were always requirements for industrial development.

The question remains: why has securing them taken so long?

There is a cost to that delay, even if it does not appear in a departmental performance table. It lies in investment deferred, businesses that could not proceed, and employment that remained prospective. There is a whole generation of Saldanha residents who have been waiting for that ambition to translate into better livelihoods.

Welcoming the lease does not remove the need to explain those failures.

The test now is delivery. How much of that R6.9 billion pipeline becomes investment on the ground? Which businesses will begin operating, and how many sustained jobs will follow? Who will be accountable if the same obstacles persist?

Saldanha does not need another explanation of its potential. It needs institutions capable of realising it. After three decades, another agreement cannot be allowed to give an old promise a new starting date.

Jade Davenport is a historian and writer whose work explores mining, history, business, and society. She is the author of Digging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa, now in its second edition. She lives between London and Johannesburg.