Heritage is usually associated with what we inherit from the past: languages, traditions, music, buildings and stories passed down from one generation to the next. Another form of heritage that should receive far more attention is the ability to make things.
South Africa has spent generations building industrial capability across mining, engineering, automotive manufacturing, chemicals and food processing. Behind these industries are people with accumulated technical knowledge, businesses with specialised capabilities, and institutions that have trained the artisans and engineers required to sustain production.
That heritage is now under serious strain. Statistics South Africa reported that manufacturing employment fell by 100,000 jobs year on year in the second quarter of 2026. Manufacturing output contracted by 1.8% in the same quarter, marking its third consecutive quarterly decline. Behind those figures are factories operating below capacity, suppliers losing contracts and skills built over decades beginning to disperse.
So what is actually lost when a country stops making things?
The tyre industry offers a useful lens on that question. A tyre looks like a simple consumer product, but producing one locally is far from simple. It depends on specialised equipment, skilled workforce, engineering expertise, rigorous quality systems, and a web of supporting businesses that grows around a factory over years. None of that shows up on the label; all of it disappears when the factory closes.
The immediate concern when manufacturing capacity is lost is usually jobs, and rightly so in a country with South Africa’s unemployment rate. But the damage compounds. Skilled workers leave the sector. Supplier networks contract. Technical knowledge becomes harder to maintain once the people who hold it move on. Investment in adjacent capabilities dries up because there’s less industry left to invest in. Over time, an economy quietly becomes dependent on products made elsewhere, not through any single decision, but through the accumulation of small ones.
None of this is an argument for making everything at home or for treating imports as the enemy. South Africa is part of a global economy and local producers have to compete on cost, quality, reliability and innovation, like everyone else. Nor is it an argument for propping up businesses that genuinely can’t compete. Industrial heritage is not a case for protection at any cost.
It is about making it easier to compete. That means investment-friendly regulation, functioning infrastructure and logistics, and a policy environment that treats manufacturers as partners rather than an afterthought. Preserving manufacturing doesn’t mean keeping old factories running as they always have. It means building an industry that can still compete a decade from now, in a manufacturing environment being reshaped by automation, new materials, changing energy systems and increasingly complex global supply chains.
In August 2023, the South African Tyre Manufacturers Conference (SATMC) launched the Homegrown #DrivingLocal initiative, a nationwide campaign urging consumers, fleet managers, and government bodies to choose and prioritise locally manufactured tyres. The initiative’s four key objectives are to boost the economy and preserve jobs; to fight illicit trade and dumping; to improve safety and road longevity; and to promote industry innovation.
That’s why “Homegrown” needs to mean more than a stamp on a product. It should describe the skills developed here, the suppliers that have grown up around local production, and the expertise built over decades of making things in this country. Capability like that, once lost, is genuinely hard to rebuild. You can’t simply reopen a factory and expect the knowledge to still be there.
The real question, then, isn’t local versus imported. It’s whether South Africa is still building and maintaining the capability to produce, innovate and compete. Heritage Month tends to look backwards, at what a generation received and what it chose to pass on. Manufacturing heritage should be judged the same way. Young South Africans need more than the memory of industries that once existed. They need workplaces where technical skills are still taught, and a real shot at becoming engineers, technicians, artisans and manufacturing entrepreneurs.
The local tyre industry is a small but telling part of that story. Its value lies not only in the tyres it produces but also in the ecosystem of skills and suppliers that production sustains. The real test of our industrial heritage was never whether we could say something was once made in South Africa. It’s whether the next generation still has the capability and the opportunity to make what comes next.
Nduduzo Chala is the Executive Director of the South African Tyre Manufacturers Conference (SATMC)
