Business Live

15 September 2025

An ATM bomb exploded at 1am on a characteristically quiet Friday in Dimbaza in late August. As a local newspaper suggested, “[the] explosion marked the time the township was finally stripped of its last means of accessing cash”.

It had lost the “means” to access nearby jobs far earlier. Dimbaza has never shed its tag as a dumping ground for African people deemed surplus. Within two years of its first arrivals during the Ciskei era, the makeshift cemetery had nearly 90 new graves, mainly children, some buried in tomato boxes.

Nearly six decades after the first families were dumped in the area from the farms of the Karoo, the place is a ghost town. Of Dimbaza’s nearly 50 factories (I don’t have the official tally) only a handful remain operational. The carcasses and skeletons of the steel structures visible from the R63 that connects Alice (eDikeni) and King William’s Town (eQonce) look like an upheaval wrought by a disaster rather than the chronic stress of a long and drawn-out decline.

Its present tenants tell a story of deindustrialisation. One factory now houses a school, another a church. The nearby shack settlement makes good use of the zinc sheeting of many of these derelict buildings. The only plant undergoing some refurbishment is one of the early showpieces of the area, Dimbaza Weavers, a niche mohair spinner. As I drove past recently, construction workers busied themselves with plaster and repurposing the plant.

Far smaller than the original land it was on, the wool washery behind Dimbaza Weavers, which in its heyday was an example of European fixed investment for the Ciskeian managerial elite, seems set for revival too. A local told me the old swimwear factory on the other side of the railway line was the site of a police discovery a few months before.

What I saw in Dimbaza was eerily ominous, like something out of a post-industrial sci- fi movie.

I had seen Isithebe after the 2021 riots and the burning and looting of machinery and buildings, but what I saw in Dimbaza was eerily ominous, like something out of a post-industrial sci-fi movie. The type of thing District 9 director Neill Blomkamp makes, with its dystopian themes of dehumanisation, social apocalypse and breakdown of civic cohesion.

Yet this was real, and happening today. As one Mr Mjodo, one of two security guards working rolling shifts in the wide area, suggested, the ceaseless search for valuable copper or any other high-value waste from this expensive but neglected industrial real estate moves with little resistance.

While the immediate security issues in estates such as Dimbaza, Babelegi or Isithebe concern the few tenants who remain, it is the prospects for the revival or repurposing of these areas that seem to be a perennial site of effort. For politicians, businesspeople and even altruistic go-getters, the many failed co-operatives here coexist with the first wave of tenants, and the debris of the recent waves of attempts at resuscitation provide a cursory lesson.

It is not about production alone. It is also about the terms for sale of what is produced, and how it competes with cheaper imports produced on an incomparable level of scale and at different unit economics. Put simply, it is about the kind of opening up SA has experienced, and how in the throes of the uncertainty in the global multilateral system opportunities exist (at some consumer cost, of course) to protect labour-intensive capabilities linked to our needs.

The many furniture, schoolwear and niche textile companies Dimbaza once housed, for instance. It may need more than just nostalgia and public contracts, but a cold assessment of what is possible, or more explosions may make the dystopia of Dimbaza match the story of other decentralisation experiments of old.

• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.