The developer of the Port of Gauteng inland logistics hub, Francois Nortje, whose successful court case against the Gauteng government has kneecapped its much-hyped Tambo Springs inland port, says its arrogance in believing it was above the law got it into this mess.
“They spent R30m to R40m on this court case and it was a dead duck from day one,” says Nortje.
In a blistering judgment, the Joburg high court cancelled the project’s environmental authorisation and subsequent amendments because of serious defects which “vitiated the entire process”. The deadline to file an appeal was missed, so the ruling will stand.
Nortje says he’s been warning the province for years that the project was illegal and he would take it to court, but its attitude was: “We’ll litigate you into submission instead of accepting we made a bugger-up and fix it.”
He was told he must work with the province and stop the court cases, but there’s another one pending. “I said I can’t work with Tambo Springs; it’s an unlawful development. It has so many legal, environmental and town planning issues that it was a mistake to start it. It was outside the urban edge in an area that Ekurhuleni regarded as a green lung. There was no planning for sewer, no planning for municipal water or for major electricity. How can I work with an unlawful, unworkable project?”
The Port of Gauteng has been in the pipeline since 2012, when Nortje, who has a background in business and property, decided to go into logistics properties. By 2018, he and his backer, NT55 Investments, owned 260ha of the 1,400ha identified by Ekurhuleni for logistics and light industry along the railway line and N3 freeway southeast of Joburg.
In October 2019 they launched their R50bn project, but the government hasn’t shown “the faintest interest”, he says.
When he presented a white paper in October last year detailing how the Port of Gauteng together with the government could turn the Durban-Gauteng freight corridor from a “logistics nightmare” into a catalyst for economic growth and jobs, nobody from the government came.
“We invited the national department of transport and the Gauteng premier, the provincial department of roads, mayors and ward councillors to the white paper launch. They’ve all been invited extensively to engage. Not one of them came to the launch; not one of them has shown the faintest interest.”
When premier Panyaza Lesufi gave his state of the province address, the Port of Gauteng project was No 10 on the list of projects he mentioned. He said it excited him very much, but didn’t once mention it by name.
The state of the city address by the Ekurhuleni mayor completely ignored it, says Nortje. “They didn’t mention the Port of Gauteng once. They talked about Tambo Springs and how it’s going to start in November … These politicians don’t want the project that can work, the one that’s got the rights, that’s got the services. They keep on pushing Tambo Springs. They don’t want to give any recognition to the Port of Gauteng or promote it in any way, except if I work with Tambo Springs and drop my court cases.”
There are “so many things wrong with Tambo Springs”, he says, not least the proposed 5km access road which crosses a floodplain. “They wanted me to withdraw my court cases and work with Tambo Springs to promote the corridor. Then the premier will support the Port of Gauteng. I’ve been told that since David Makhura was the premier.”
A top executive of port logistics company Newlyn Group, which has built a R3.4bn rail terminal next to the port of Durban and taken options on Tambo Springs, asked Nortje why he was “such a fool to fight the people I’m going to need one day for approvals. I said, why are you such a fool to have a project that’s dependent on the government delivering stuff? Because they’re not going to deliver.
“They messed up this environmental impact assessment so badly,” says Nortje. “We showed this to them in 2019 already. They could have withdrawn it and fixed it, but they decided to fight us. Because it’s not their money that’s at stake.
“Tambo Springs was supposed to start in 2013. The tender for this road they need only went out in December 2019. They just can’t deliver, they can’t keep to timelines. I don’t want a project that depends on government delivery. I’m very happy to be independent.”
If it turns out it’s the only terminal in Gauteng, so what? Everybody benefits from it
— Francois Nortjé
At the same time, he finds it “interesting” that the people who repeatedly promote Tambo Springs as a potential catalyst for economic growth, freight efficiency and industrial expansion in Gauteng are silent when it comes to the Port of Gauteng.
“You’ve got a government that says it wants to create jobs, but they don’t want to support the project that can create these jobs and push it along and promote it. My attorney says it’s because I’m not prepared to pay anybody. I don’t have any partners, I’m not sharing the cherries on top. What else can it be?”
He points out that the City of Ekurhuleni is in serious financial trouble and desperately in need of work opportunities.
“This project is going to create 50,000 jobs right next to Katlehong, Vosloorus, Tembisa, Thokoza, Daveyton, all those areas. The mayor won’t even mention this project in his state of the city address. He’s never said a word about it. And it’s in terms of the metropolitan spatial development plan of Ekurhuleni. The railway line runs there, the provincial road runs there, the highway runs there.”
There’s no other place where a terminal like this is going to work. He’s said as much to Juanita Maree, CEO of the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders, and Transnet group CEO Michelle Phillips, who are “very supportive but say they don’t want one monopoly to be replaced by another monopoly”.
He told them he’ll never be a Transnet. But owing to its position, his terminal will be “the quickest to load stuff off and on and the cheapest because of that. So it’s going to work and it will kill the other terminals. There’s only one OR Tambo, one Cape Town International Airport, one Durban harbour. And there might only be one inland port in Gauteng. And I think it’s going to be the Port of Gauteng.
“If it turns out it’s the only terminal in Gauteng, so what? Everybody benefits from it.”
What about Tambo Springs? “They’ve got endless hurdles to jump over. But if it ever happens, it will be 10km further from the market than the Port of Gauteng terminal. If one terminal works better and is R500 a trip cheaper, eventually everything will flow to that terminal.”
He hopes to start with construction of the terminal and first warehouses in 2027. The speed of the hub’s development will depend on how quick and effective rail reform is. “It will still develop without the rail. With thousands of trucks coming past the site from Durban every day, it doesn’t need rail to be up and running, but rail will put it on steroids.”
The Port of Gauteng inland hub will be fully developed by 2040 if Transnet gets 50% of cargo onto rail, but the signs are not hopeful.
Nortje describes himself as “a landlord. I’m a warehouse developer. I want to own the warehousing. I’m not a freight operator.” He built the terminal to facilitate warehouses because he thinks warehouses are the safest property investment.
“So I’m going to want that terminal to load every container in Gauteng if it can, because then my warehousing works better and I can develop more of them and quicker, and my land gets taken up much quicker.
“That’s why we’ve put hundreds of millions of rand into this project. Because we think it’s the only terminal that’s going to work. We want it to be like an Acsa [Airports Company South Africa], like OR Tambo, where all the planes land, where all the people get off. We want everybody’s train to stop there and offload there.”
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