U’hage- Despatch agency to close

Development organisation loses municipal funding

The next three months will signal the death knell of the once-lauded Uitenhage Despatch Development Initiative (UDDI), which could cease to exist from as early as September.

After losing funding from the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality – its sole source of cash – the UDDI board agreed to dissolve the entity upon the advice of the city.

A high-level review of the structure and mandate of the UDDI found it was fulfilling only two functions – running the Uitenhage Science and Technology Centre and enterprise development.

The metro felt that the management of the science centre could be handled by the Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA) and that the municipality’s economic development department could take over the enterprise development functions.

While the seven science centre staff members’ jobs are expected to be safe as they are to be absorbed by the MBDA, there is uncertainty about the jobs of the remaining four UDDI employees.

Chief executive Patricia Dlamini’s contract ends in September and the chief financial officer’s term, which expires today, will be extended for three months to help with the rationalisation process.

The UDDI, launched about 15 years ago, was formed with the intention of having a vehicle to drive Uitenhage- and Despatch-centred projects.

Residents from the two towns complained that since the formation of the metro in 2000, economic development projects had been largely focused in Port Elizabeth and there was a need for an initiative that would be focused specifically on their areas.

However, over the years, as funding from corporates started to dry up, the municipality became the only revenue stream.

More than R4-million of its R7-million annual budget from the city was going towards salaries, while the rest of the money had to be spent on operational costs, such as renting office space, leaving very little to pursue any meaningful capital projects.

With the move by the city’s political bosses to have a “one-city” approach to development, the municipality’s political head of economic development, tourism and agriculture, councillor Andrew Whitfield, said the MBDA would expand its mandate to include Uitenhage and Despatch in its development projects.

Plans in the pipeline included developing the precinct around the science centre and launching a new enterprise development centre in partnership with Seda, Whitfield said.

They would also assess the projects being managed by the UDDI to determine their viability and decide if any would be taken on by the city.

“The reality is that the UDDI is not an entity of the municipality, but the municipality was paying a grant to the UDDI to perform a function which the municipality was performing anyway,” he said.

“So there was duplication of functions and we met with the board and wrote to [them], and they agreed with our proposal to consolidate our funds into a one-city entity as long as the entity has some mandate in the Uitenhage area.”

He said the council had approved the decision to rationalise the entity. “The three months will allow us to identify ways and means to integrate some of those projects.

“We made certain commitments and one of those commitments was that we would mitigate as far as possible the attrition, but we never made any commitments that we would retain any jobs,” he said.

Asked what the city would do to ensure Uitenhage and Despatch residents did not feel that the metro was putting development in the two towns on the back-burner, Whitfield said: “What has the UDDI done in the last five years to develop Uitenhage and Despatch?”

UDDI board chairwoman Nonkqubela Maliza said the decision to do away with the UDDI had been made because it re - lied solely on funding from the metro.

“Without this funding, the UDDI is not a viable entity,” she said. “The board, therefore, had no option but to accept the recommendations from the metro.”

Maliza said that taking into account the available resources and hard work of staff, she felt they had gone “a long way to fulfilling its mandate of driving and promoting socioeconomic development in Uitenhage and Despatch”.

ANC caucus leader Bicks Ndoni said he felt the decision was being rushed and they would table a motion in the council to debate the matter.