It’s time to stand up for Nelson Mandela Bay and to set higher stand­ards

Windy, armpit, ghost on the coast, back­wa­ter – Nel­son Man­dela Bay has had many insults thrown at it over the years, and yet this metro remains a desir­able place to live and do busi­ness.

That’s not to pre­tend there are no down­sides, just as there are in other met­ros, cit­ies and towns in South Africa.

While we battle with muni­cipal ser­vice deliv­ery, infra­struc­ture chal­lenges, logist­ics inef­fi­cien­cies, dilap­id­ated pub­lic facil­it­ies and rising crime, we also enjoy a coastal life­style with excel­lent beaches, abund­ant nat­ural amen­it­ies and scenery, clean air, more than 300 days of sun­shine a year – the envy of many other citydwell­ers both loc­ally and glob­ally.

Add to that a lively food and enter­tain­ment scene, good schools, reas­on­able prop­erty prices, a world-class sta­dium, a pleth­ora of sport­ing ven­ues and events, vibrant retail and tour­ism sec­tors, nature reserves and local tour­ism options on our door­step.

The com­pact size of the metro makes for ease of get­ting around in terms of dis­tances and time spent in traffic, and less over-crowding than more sprawl­ing met­ros with greater pop­u­la­tion dens­ity.

We have the amen­it­ies of a large com­mer­cial and man­u­fac­tur­ing centre, within a city of man­age­able size, large enough to com­pete, yet small enough for net­work­ing, per­sonal con­nec­tions and our renowned friend­li­ness.

We have a solid base of man­u­fac­tur­ing skills, deep value chains, ample nat­ural resources for renew­able energy, two ports includ­ing SA’s deep­est deep­wa­ter port, a reas­on­ably well-con­nec­ted air­port, world-class tech­no­logy and innov­a­tion-driven com­pan­ies.

We have great people – cando atti­tudes, friendly, hos­pit­able and help­ful, and a dynamic busi­ness com­munity that believes in the future of the Bay and is will­ing to put com­pet­it­ive interests aside and get involved in col­lab­or­at­ing to fix what’s broken.

What we are not good at, though, is stand­ing up for ourselves.

We allow oth­ers to talk the Bay down, we accept their neg­at­ive com­ments and labels, and we “com­ply” rather than tak­ing a more bal­anced view where we relay the pos­it­ive facts too.

We tell busi­ness col­leagues, friends and fam­ily all the bad news; we encour­age them not to visit the Bay.

For instance, we accept the label of “Windy City”, but when you take Nel­son Man­dela Bay as a whole, we are not the win­di­est city or place in SA, our local Weather Guru Garth Sampson points out.

On aver­age wind speeds and hours of wind, we are beaten by Cape St Fran­cis and Cape Point – the win­di­est town and place in SA, respect­ively. Any­one who has vis­ited Strand or Gor­don’s Bay in the West­ern Cape, or clung onto lamp­posts in a howl­ing south­easter on Cape Town’s fore­shore, will tell you – “you people in the Bay don’t know what wind is!”

In addi­tion to neg­at­ive nick­names, we also accept bad ser­vice, rather than demand­ing that we be treated on an equal foot­ing to other met­ros and cit­ies.

The impact of neg­at­ive atti­tudes towards the Bay was brought home in a recent meet­ing with a global e-hail­ing ser­vice.

Over recent months, we have received grow­ing feed­back from our mem­bers and stake­hold­ers express­ing con­cern about the qual­ity of ehail­ing ser­vices in the metro – poor vehicle qual­ity (broken lights, doors and safety belts, safety-crit­ical mir­rors miss­ing), even doubts as to road­wor­thi­ness and drivers’ licences and iden­tity, dirty vehicles, poor driver atti­tudes, rais­ing con­cerns for both per­sonal and traffic/vehicle safety.

The over­all impres­sion is that the qual­ity of e-hail­ing ser­vices avail­able in the Bay falls far short com­pared with other met­ros across the coun­try and glob­ally, and that they do not meet the stand­ards set by the e-hail­ing plat­forms them­selves.

Res­id­ents and vis­it­ors to our metro deserve to have access to safe, clean and pro­fes­sional trans­port ser­vices.

For many vis­it­ors, their first exper­i­ence of Nel­son Man­dela Bay begins with a trip from the air­port, and this ini­tial inter­ac­tion often forms a last­ing impres­sion of our city. Unfair as that is, it is real­ity.

And yet, when we tackled one of these e-hail­ing oper­at­ors on their poor ser­vice loc­ally, we were dis­missed with a com­ment that “this is a poor city – you get the ser­vice you can afford”.

That is com­pletely unac­cept­able.

And it is by no means the only neg­at­ive atti­tude we have encountered, with sug­ges­tions that we some­how deserve less from national ser­vice pro­viders and busi­nesses oper­at­ing in the Bay.

We have asked Cham­ber mem­bers to com­plete a sur­vey on their views on the clean­li­ness, safety, driver beha­viour, and over­all qual­ity of the ehail­ing ser­vice in the Bay, as well as what addi­tional ser­vices busi­nesspeople would like to see intro­duced here.

We will be tak­ing this for­ward, to lobby for bet­ter qual­ity and ser­vice.

We also encour­age all ehail­ing cus­tom­ers to report issues on the rel­ev­ant app – if we all raise our voices, we can bring about improve­ments.

The Busi­ness Cham­ber is not let­ting it stand there, and we are act­ively tak­ing on poor ser­vice provided to local cus­tom­ers – in pub­lic trans­port, and bey­ond.

Addi­tion­ally, if we care about and want to elev­ate “Brand Nel­son Man­dela Bay” and restore pride in our metro, we must demon­strate that pride ourselves.

Shift­ing neg­at­ive per­cep­tions of our metro starts with us – tak­ing pride, elev­at­ing the pos­it­ives, tak­ing action rather than com­plain­ing, and demand­ing the ser­vice we deserve.

• Den­ise van Huyssteen is Chief Exec­ut­ive Officer of the Nel­son Man­dela Bay Busi­ness Cham­ber

The Herald