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Student Accommodation Crisis: finger points squarely at mayor
This piece first appeared in The Herald on 17 February 2026
The unending panoramic landscape along the N9 through that part of the Karroo between Middleburg and what is soon to be Robert Sobukwe Town, is without any doubt the most spectacular to be found anywhere in the world. The only thing that could possibly have made this route more breathtaking would have been for there to a dramatic thunderstorm playing itself out, like the one that I was driving through on my way back from Johannesburg this Tuesday. You see my son and I had driven my daughter up to start her last year at Wits where we settled her in to her new flat with furniture we had hauled up from the farm on the back of my old Hilux.
On the miles and miles of open road between Johannesburg and Gqeberha my mind flitted between what a shit ton of money it costs to raise kids and what a beautiful privilege it is for me to have been so lucky as to earn a living in this impossible economy and ensure that each of my three beautiful children are able to make the most of their brilliant young minds.
As I drive, my thoughts also drift to the good progress we have made as a country in seeing to it that capable matriculants are no longer denied the ability to study at a tertiary institution just because their mama and papa are broke, debilitated or absent. NSFAS, I am sure, is not perfect but it does bring us a little bit closer to the kind of country I would prefer to live in.
I also know that the kind of South Africa that many of the protesting students currently being shot down by balaclava wearing private militia in Summerstrand would like to live in may not be achievable in my lifetime. Many of their demands seek to undermine the integrity of the university system. We must however recognise that some of their grievances can actually be addressed and should be attended to as a matter of utmost urgency.
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To be honest, I don’t know much at all about university admission criteria or the “NMU Meal Management System” so I will remain silent on those matters. I do know quite a bit though about student accommodation. And it is regarding the matter of the critical shortage of student accommodation, that we need to point a finger squarely at the NMBM Mayor Babalwa Lobishe. Why? You may ask. This is a university matter and nothing to do with the metro. Well, this is where you are getting it wrong and this is where those that must be held accountable hide behind their ignorance of technical and planning matters to create confusion. But don’t worry, I am here to clear things up for everybody.
You see, while there is a lot of noise around the subject, the undeniable truth is that there is a drastic undersupply of adequate student accommodation in the metro. My clever friend Aurick (one of the few MBA’s I know that are not too boring to have coffee with) explains to me that the shortage of student beds in the NMB metro runs into the thousands! That’s not Okay! What is often missed though is that a significant proportion of student housing is provided by the private sector on land owned by the private sector. This is of course where the NMBM comes in, because it is the metro that decides (through its land use policies) where student residences can be built and where they cannot be built. You may not believe this, but the NMBM have decided that almost all of the all of the private land within walking distance of the north and south campus of the NMU may not be developed as student residences. I kid you not! Sure, the NMBM may point to their student accommodation policy which permits the owner of any ordinary home to apply for the “right” to accommodate students. But even where I, in my professional capacity, have helped these private land owners jump through all the mindless and impossible hoops to get such a “special consent”, the property is still only permitted to accommodate 12 students. 12 Students! That’s a joke. In Braamfontein (withing walking distance of Wits), a property big enough to fit only one rich person’s house in Summerstrand, will easily accommodate 200 students.
Now I know that running a metro is not easy and I know that making the kind of policy decisions to remove the obstacles standing in the way of the provision of student accommodation is not easy. We also however know that it can be done and that other municipalities have already shown us how to do it. So, to Mayor Lobishe, if I am telling you something you did not know, you need to immediately (and very publicly) fire your advisors and replace them with people literate in these matters. If however, you already know and understand that NMBM policy is the largest single obstacle standing in the way of private investors solving our student housing crisis and have done nothing about it, I am sure the citizens of NMB Metro would like to know why you feel protesting students should not be burning tyres in front of City Hall instead of along University Way. Please Mayor Lobishe, take the public into your confidence. We are all in this together!
Lake Kragga Kamma
Thank you Dean McCleland for this very interesting History of Lake Kragga Kamma and the region.
Frogs at the dam this time of year.
Has the time come for us to start re-ruralizing?
It’s a grey and dreary winter’s day. My thoughts go to Youth Day as I drive down Buffelsfontein road toward my regular Walmer coffee spot. My mind dwells on the sad truth that the passenger seats in my car are all empty. My children have now grown and left this town for a brighter future. No youth in my car this youth day.
My gloomy sadness is interrupted though, by an unfamiliar sight by the side of the road. A makeshift water station on the verge with a number of emergency taps on light blue plastic standpipes. Our answer to “Day Zero,” I am told, has been to drill boreholes in strategic spots and allow people to fill containers of water enough to drink and cook and clean with. Later, over coffee, I can’t help but think, that if ever there was a monument built to mark the failure of government in this town of ours, then these blue standpipes are it. No political argument, no beaming Politian’s picture in the press or free pop concert for the masses can argue away these pipes. They are there standing boldly as monumental evidence of our inability to manage the affairs of this city region. The unavoidable truth is that government is failing at the most basic and fundamental level. Running water and flushing toilets are not rocket science. Running water is the most fundamental and non-negotiable starting point of what we have come to expect from urban living.
I am sorry to tell you though that I really don’t have any answer to the water problem. I’m simply using this very visible failure as an excuse to talk about a question that’s interesting to me right now:
Is it not time we begin to re-ruralise?
Is it not time that we accept that our current system, just does not have what it takes to effectively manage towns and cities? I mean, have you driven down the main road in Humansdorp lately? It’s one continuous pothole. Makhanda has had water problems for years. Mthata is chaos!!
Is it corruption? Is it white monopoly capital? Is it the construction mafia? Is it lazy officials who earn fat salaries but don’t deliver? I’m not interested in those questions right now. I am interested rather to zoom out a bit and consider the slightly larger question of why it is that we, as a civilisation, have decided to build cities and towns in the first place and whether the conditions that seemed to make cities and towns a good idea way back then, still prevail.
I can completely understand why the first towns and cities must have sprung up all those thousands of years ago in Iraq and elsewhere. Back then it was so much easier to get all the cool stuff you needed by living in a city like Eridu. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker were all right there. By contrast, your rural cousin had to figure out how to make what ever cool stuff he wanted all by himself. Living in the countryside was a ball ache!
With time, through the growth of civilisation, the industrial revolution and right up to the 21st century, cities became increasingly sexy. The city meant, running water and electricity. It meant education for your kids. It meant music and entertainment. It meant fun church and religious activities. It meant access to more potential romantic partners. It meant access to better health care. City living though (for all but the very rich) came at a huge price. City dwellers contend with crime, bad food, air pollution, overcrowding and worst of all; jobs to pay for all these conveniences and cool stuff. But perhaps the biggest price we paid was the loss of our connection with the land, the fresh smell of rain on the soil and the feeling of being part of the glorious living organism that is our mysterious planet.
What I see lately though is a glimmer of an exciting shift brought about by rapidly advancing technology. A discernible adjustment in focus from urban to rural. Thanks to solar and battery technology, we no longer need to live in a city to run a fridge or computer. Thanks to cheap electric pumps and plastic piping, rural homes can have running water and flush toilets. Very soon, even remote rural areas will have super-fast satellite internet. This will give rural people access to the highest quality education through apps like Udemy, the highest quality preaching for the religious-mined though apps like YouTube. It will give access to a huge pool of potential romantic partners through Tinder and Instagram. Sure, living in the city will still give you somethings that you just don’t get in the country, but I am open to the idea that the scales will begin to tip. As city living becomes increasingly less bearable, as we are no longer able to shower or water our tomato plant and as rural living becomes slightly less tedious, we make be shocked to see a landslide of people beginning to Re-ruralise. Of course, this trend will begin with the rich, but as we have seen with all technological change, these trends spread very, very fast to the poor. (Remember how cell phones were first just for millionaires and rock stars?)
Will Banana Circles save the planet?
No they wont. But I have a lot of fun making them : )
How about, Lets work toward a re-ruralised future??
For a very long time the general consensus has been that progress equals Urbanisation. While I can see how the past that we come from relied on technologies and conveniences that were just not available to people in the rural areas, I can see now that a shift in technology (and its nudging along by Covid) has helped many of us to beginning to imagine a re-ruralized future.
I really quite enjoyed this piece below that speaks to some of the key drivers in re-ruralisation thinking.
Swallows at the dam
Architects of the world, please remember the buildings and landscapes you design are habitats for wildlife too. Swallows must make their nests, bees and butterflies must do their thing! There is room for all of us on the planet. It just takes a little mindfulness in the part of decision makers.
The Forgotten Art of Subtraction
Though it really seemed impossible to me at times, I have eventually settled in back at the cottage at Pebblespring Farm. I had set for myself the clear intention of having Christmas lunch with my family at the cottage. I am happy to say, we achieved this objective.
Its been a lot of work getting the cottage into a semi-livable state again . I am not at all happy at all with the way in which the tenant I had treated the place. But I get the sense now that we will chip away at this project in our own time for as long as it takes.
There is something deeply satisfying about being here. Committing my energy to projects that feel that I “own” in someway. I am not exactly sure about why it feels so good, but the “why” of theses things is never really as important as just observing and taking note of the energy as it presents itself in my body and in my sense of well being.
I have been resting as much as I can in between the various cottage and farm projects. In my resting time at the dam in the morning, with my coffee, I have time to think a little. This morning I spent some time thinking about the work I love doing on the farm and in the forest. I notice that this work, over the last few years, has largely to do with taking away what I don’t want. It has largely to do with “subtracting” and not to do with adding. When I am working with the chainsaw removing the alien invasive Inkberry (Cestrum laevigatum) or the Long Leaved Wattle (Acacia longifolia), my strategy has been to remove what I don’t want, quite surgically, then sitting back and watching as the new forest, new life and new beauty emerges. In the forest, I do not plant the new trees. I do not introduce the new life or the new beauty. It simply rises up, as if by magic, after my work of removing and subtracting what it is that I did not want.
When I take the time to sit and think, I notice how so much of what is going on in my life, with Pebblespring Farm for example , is some kind of metaphor, as if though,(in ways I can not possibly understand) my life is “fractal”, where the part reflects the whole and the whole reflects the part. Let me explain what it is that I think I mean. I can see that in my life my task becomes to remove those elements that do not suite me, that are not beautiful to me. Because my life, this existence, what I experience as reality is a living dynamic organism. The forest has a life of its own. It creates new and beautiful things all the time, especially if I can just help it along be subtracting that which is not good and which is not pleasing. (if the forest were pristine, and not infested and invaded by unnaturally introduced alien species, I would of course not need to intervene at all!) The forest is not inanimate. I must do my part, but the forest responds by making making beautiful spaces and views and habitats. I did not make these beautiful things, but here they are, clear as the light of day. And so perhaps in my life, I must be less anxious about what new stuff I feel I should build for myself, but rather spend time focusing on what it is that I must subtract.
I have seen that there are people that have followed a path of “spiritual” discovery that took the dramatic step to remove all the things from their lives. In the ancient way of the Sharman or the Monk, they give up all of their possessions, their loved ones, everything that they may have valued. But is this not perhaps the equivalent of bringing bulldozers to Pebblespring farm and flattening everything down to barren sand and rock. (Incidentally this is exactly what my late neighbor, Richard Hall, did next-door about five years ago at his place and I can tell you the land is lifeless and dead to this day.)
That is not the path I have chosen for Pebblespring Farm and that is not the path I have chosen for my life. Rather than flattening everything I have chosen rather to specifically and surgically remove those parts that do not work for me. In my life and at Pebblespring Farm I have also not opted for an “anything goes” approach. I do not just let the unsightly alien invasive bush take over, I do not allow my life to be taken over by social media or booze or carbohydrates or people that abuse me me. Perhaps the way I have chosen is a “middle way”?
In spite of all of what I have already subtracted, I am acutely conscious that there is still a lot in my life that does not work for me. Commuting does not work for me. Mindless admin does not work for me. Inhuman bureaucracy does not work for me. And people who do not love me. People who do not respect me. People who I do not “vibe” with. (“Vibe” is actually quite a nice word to use in this instance. It hints a the mysterious and unfathomable vibration that is beauty and attraction.)
I have already done a lot in the last few years to make my life simpler. (COVID has been helpful in this regard actually!). There is still a lot of work for me going forward to remove these unwanted aspects from my life. I am conscious that it will take a lot of time. But I must work methodically and consistently, but not so hard that I loose myself, and that I forget what I am trying to do in the first place. I must not allow myself to become so numb and so beaten that I cannot see the beauty. Because if I cant see the beauty, I will loose the energy I need to continue in the exercise of subtraction.
Perhaps I will report back on my progress here on this blog from time to time. Who knows??
Self and other
I have been spending evenings lately listening to Alan Watts. He has a whole bunch of stuff on YouTube, all recorded before he died in 1973, but lovingly uploaded more recently to the internet by followers from all over the world. He speaks so incredibly eloquently about matters of Zen and Tao an so much of what we says resonates very deeply with me.
What I am thinking of tonight is the phenomenon that Alan Watts speaks of in our tendency to for us to obsess about separating our “self” from the “other” and how actually if one looks closely enough, we begin to see how it is we are in fact a lot more integral with the reality around us than what we say we are. It seems to me that we make attempts all the time to play this game of separation: We see ourselves as separate from nature, even to the point where forget we are animals. We see ourselves and different and distinct from the thousands of gods we have embraced across many civilizations and cultures. We see our gods as the “other”.
We take this idea of “self” and “other” even further into the game we play within our own species where at a group level, we separate, our class, our religion, our nation as distinct from the other. We have often even made war along these lines. Killing and maiming ourselves in the process.
But is it not interesting to see that we are not happy to stop even there. Rather we insist even in our individual selves to create separation. We great a separation between our role as son and as father, as lover and as worker. We even wear separate “uniforms” at work and at home. We have a separate uniform for going to church and for playing golf, we even have pajamas as our “uniform” for sleeping. All of this in a desperate attempt to convince ourselves of the illusion that everything is separate. Well it is not! Everything is part of everything else. This is just the simple truth.
So in a small way perhaps, I see the move back to Pebblespring Farm and other lifestyle design steps I have taken, as an attempt to work against the drive toward separation. Because if there is no separation between work and home, perhaps it is a simpler task to get to a point where these is no separation between attraction and action or work and leisure. Where there is no separation between my health and the health of my business and there is no separation between the health of my business and the health of the people I employ and there is no separation between my prosperity and the prosperity of my clients.
There was a time when I was self conscious of over thinking things or sounding “too philosophical” But now as I am older. I am wiser. I realize that actually that is exactly the game I like to play. The game of “seeing the world in just one grain of sand” The game of treating what comes to me in my life every day as having some special, mystical meaning and significance just for me. Life’s just more fun this way! It makes me take everything that much more seriously!!!
TimHewitt-Coleman.com 