By MALIKHANYE MANKAYI, APHIWE NGOWAPI and SIBABALWE TAME
A new economic impact report into the proposed removal of the High Court from Makhanda to Bhisho says if the move goes ahead, unemployment in Makhanda will skyrocket from 38.3% to above 50%, significantly higher than the national average of 33.6%.
“Without the high court in Makhanda, the local economy will collapse. This is not an exaggeration. This can quite easily turn Makhanda into a ghost town,” said Prof Sizwe Mabizela, Rhodes University vice-chancellor and deputy chairperson of the Makana High Court Action Committee, which commissioned the report.
Mabizela, Ntobeko Yokwana, director of Yokwana Attorneys based in Makhanda and Brin Brody, a senior director at the Wheeldon Rushmere and Cole law firm, launched the report on 20 January.
Authored by Geoff Antrobus, an emeritus professor in the Economics Department at Rhodes University, the report concludes that if the main seat of the High Court in Eastern Cape is removed to Bhisho, people working in the legal profession in Makhanda will lose between R230m and R370m in earnings.
Law firms would be forced to reduce staff by half or shut down completely, and a wave of retrenchments would sweep through other businesses associated with the legal profession. There would no longer be any positions at all for candidate attorneys in the town, and over 5000 attorneys, ordinary workers and clerical staff working in law firms, at the High Court, the NPA offices in the city, law firms, office of the Master of the High Court and in associated industries would lose their jobs.
The candidate report found that professional and support staff would be unlikely to be able to move to Bisho and would likely end up jobless. According to the report, local stationers and courier companies would face job losses once legal firms closed down.
Mabizela said while 5000 jobs may sound inconsequential in a country of 60 million people, it is a “huge number” in a town the size of Makhanda. The food security of tens of thousands of dependents of the 5000 people would be threatened because the only significant employers in the city were the High Court and the university, Mabizela added.
The launch of the Makana High Court Action Committee report by Economics Emeritus professor Geoff Antrobus on 20 January 2023. Photo: Sibabalwe Tame
The new unemployment level of over 50% would surpass the average unemployment rate in Eastern Cape of 47.4% – which is already the province with the highest unemployment levels in the country, the report found.
Bhisho is part of the Buffalo City Municipality, situated just three kilometres from Qonce and 70 kilometres from East London. The Bhisho Bar of Advocates has only 63 members, none of whom work from Bhisho – they all work from chambers in East London. Therefore, Makhanda’s loss would not be Bhisho’s gain, the economic report found.
The Action Committee, chaired by the Archbishop of Cape Town and former Bishop of Grahamstown Thabo Makgoba, believed too that there was no socio-economic benefit to removing services and job-creating institutions from medium-sized towns and concentrating them in cities that were already developed.
It would cost R1 billion in public funds to build the necessary new facilities in Bhisho – money that could better be spent on upgrading run-down courts across the country. “The cost implications are beyond acceptance,” Mabizela said.
The removal would also greatly disadvantage Fort England Psychiatric Hospital as the High Court received thousands of cases from the hospital.
The Action Committee added that it was simplistic to suggest that access to justice would improve for communities in Mthatha and the former Transkei by moving the High Court 130 kilometres closer to them. This is because the enormous amount of public funds needed to pay for the move and the “devastation” wreaked on the Makhanda community would far outweigh any benefits. The court would also be further away from over 500 000 court users based in Nelson Mandela Bay.
This is the fifth attempt to remove the High Court from Makhanda. The previous four attempts failed because it was accepted that removing the court from Makhanda would cripple the town’s economy and result in the closure of legal firms in Makhanda.
The submission deadline to the Moseneke Commission of Enquiry is Friday, 27 January. Submissions can be sent to Makena Z Moagi (MakMoagi@justice.gov.za) or Adv Seakamela (SSeakamela@justice.gov.za) at the Department of Justice.
