STEPHEN MEINTJES: The great ANC bombing of Joburg’s northern suburbs

She added that a significant part of the urban economy was premised on real estate and related activities. “The fact that access to and ownership of urban land remains out of reach for the majority of the urban population is unsustainable given the steadily increasing patterns of urbanisation, unemployment and inequality.”

In case you don’t know what she is talking about, take a look at the growing masses of shacks all around the outskirts of greater Johannesburg. Ironically, this decades-old exodus from the rural areas is also due to the ANC, which heeded Michael Katz’s advice to “harmonise” homeland taxes with the rest of SA instead of recognising that, when shorn of the original apartheid motivation, they were merely a partial recognition of the fact that areas with minimal locational advantage (minimal land rent) cannot yield the minimum required returns on capital if taxed.

So, most of the homeland industries closed down. This folly was exacerbated by the replacement of an avoidable 4% GST with the efficient 15% VAT, while the decades-long delay in putting a half decent N3 through the Transkei did nothing to improve locational advantage either.

The decimation of economic activity in rural areas is part of a larger conversation, but right now urban dwellers throughout SA have a stand-alone, no-brainer of a solution to urban blight. Moreover, it also addresses the spatial inequities of apartheid.

Site value rating only in Soweto and other former townships would put the emphasis fully back on their mostly lower land values, as compared with more affluent areas and CBDs, without the comparison being blurred by including buildings. So whichever way you look at it, site value rating would spur development.

Whether you think of the space above the Sandton Gautrain station, the hole next to Old Mutual or the encouragement to build structures for small, and not so small, businesses in Soweto close to labour and customers, it will be a winner.

If it sounds like magic it is just the magic of reason and need not await the survival or otherwise of the ANC. Being practical rather than political, this proposal can be taken up by almost any political party, but it would not be surprising if it were first to be taken up by one of the newer political formations now in the offing.

• Meintjes is head of equities research at a Johannesburg brokerage and co-author of “Our Land, Our Rent, Our Jobs”. He writes in his personal capacity.

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