The gleaming new parking facility at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront has an on-site Aston Martin dealership in a prime seafront position to let you know where you stand in the order of things. Its critics in V&A management call it the Garage Mahal.
Park your own grossly inadequate conveyance on the roof and you can gaze across Table Bay to Robben Island. Container ships slide by in slow motion: the ferry to the island, snarled up in court action and scandal, does not .
To your left is the Granger Bay marina with its flanking ridge of eye-wateringly expensive flats. On your right is the long wall of the east pier. But the controversial bit is right in front of you. Not the great sweep of ocean from Robben Island to Milnerton that the Sunday Times says Transnet has ”sold to foreigners”, but a much smaller divot kicked several hundred metres wide and deep into the coast.
There, where the Atlantic rollers spend themselves on jumbled dolosse, is what Transnet’s exasperated CEO, Maria Ramos, calls a ”dot” on the map of the bay that may be subject to reclamation.
Standing on the roof of the uncommonly well-situated garage, however, it is plain why a relatively small area is so important to the consortium of Emirati, British and empowerment investors who bought the Waterfront in 2006 for R7-billion.
This stretch of gravelly beach and ocean has since at least 2001 been earmarked by the V&A as ”proposed reclamation area”. Dump enough rocks and concrete here and you could build an armada of apartment blocks with uninterrupted and uninterruptible views north and west across the water.
Existing apartments along the Waterfront’s much less spectacular inner basin regularly sell for prices around R20-million. One as yet-unbuilt unit has gone for R110million.
A developer who sold 500 flats on the reclaimed bit of Granger Bay at an average price of R20-million would gross R10-billion.
So it is unsurprising that the Waterfront’s new owners are worried about legislation before Parliament that would curb private development on coastal public property.
Those owners are Dubai World, the investment arm of that emirate’s governing royal family, London and Regional Properties, which belongs to a publicity-shy pair of brothers, and a hastily stitched-together consortium of local empowerment players.
The profitability of their investment hinges on the extent to which they can develop the Waterfront, and they have made it very clear that they intend to do so on a major scale. Following the 2006 Waterfront deal Dubai World said some 45% of development rights for the precinct remained unexploited.
The company’s point man in Cape Town, James Wilson, spoke about reclaiming land in Granger Bay and building at least two plush new hotels. Whether the consortium has in fact bought the right to do so, or just the right to spend years entangled in environmental-impact and town-planning negotiations, is going to be the subject of controversy for years to come.
It is widely believed in the provincial ANC, among local property developers and on the opposition benches in the provincial legislature that the new owners paid way above the odds for the Waterfront. The theory is they were prepared to do so because they had assiduously cultivated local politicians and were confident that their well-connected empowerment partners could ensure favourable treatment of planning applications to build upwards and outwards.
Some credence was lent to this theory when the province, prodded by then premier Ebrahim Rasool, put up for sale the adjacent Somerset Hospital site, which is coveted by Dubai World for one of its hotels. Allegations quickly emerged that the process had been tilted to favour Dubai World and a flotilla of ANC-linked business people.
That is what the real battle over the future of the waterfront is about. Not the mythical sale of 22km of coastline and the seabed as far as Robben Island, but whether the new owners have purchased an exemption from proposed laws to limit privatisation of public seashore, and indeed whether they thought they could buy political support to circumvent existing planning rules.
Transnet says it is bound by the terms of sale only to try to ensure a legislative environment amenable to the proposed reclamation.
What others in provincial political and business establishments may have bound themselves to, if anything, we don’t know. But if anyone promised a smooth open road for the concrete mixers and labourers, the fickle politics of the Western Cape will almost certainly ensure that they can’t deliver.