From South Africa’s top butchery to a dilapidated building

·28 Jan 2025

The Uitkyk Vleismark in Lichtenburg was a prosperous business which won the ‘Best Butchery in South Africa’ award. However, municipal mismanagement killed the enterprise.

Entrepreneur Susan Ludick started Uitkyk Vleismark in Lichtenburg in the nineties with second-hand equipment and five employees.

She built it into one of the country’s top butcheries, which included moving to a building with better parking and a modern layout.

The success enabled her to upgrade and enhance their equipment to the latest on the butchery market.

The business grew rapidly, and she became a significant employer in the town with twenty-four highly skilled people.

She added other divisions, including a packaging- and spice shop, a take-away café, and a to-hire shop for catering supplies.

It became a landmark business in Lichtenburg and despite being situated in a small town, it competed favourably against its counterparts across South Africa.

Uitkyk Vleismark won the top national prize numerous times in the annual Cleaver Awards, which the South African Red Meat Industry Forum presented.

The awards recognise butcheries that meet the highest standards based on consumer feedback.

In addition to winning the national award, it was named the best butchery in the North West province for many consecutive years.

Uitkyk Vleismark was also named the Boerewors Koning in the Santam and Jacaranda Boerewors competition and the National Meat Marketer of the Year.

The Lichtenburg Business Chamber lauded Uitkyk Vleismark’s achievements, saying its owner and staff are an example to other businesses in the town.

She ran a successful medium-sized business in Lichtenburg and employed 26 people across the three divisions.

Ludick was one of the wealthiest and most successful business owners in Lichtenburg and ran her company for three decades.

She was named Businesswomen of the Year by the South African Union of Business Women, celebrating her success.

A mismanaged municipality crushed Uitkyk Vleismark

The collapse of the Ditsobotla Local Municipality (DLM), which runs Lichtenburg, crushed Ludick’s businesses.

The town’s taps regularly run dry, and most households and businesses rely on water tankers and boreholes for water.

Electricity outages can last for days or weeks, infrastructure like roads has collapsed, and the municipality cannot pay its service providers.

While many businesses have continued to push through, others have closed shop as the challenges became too much to handle.

Clover was one of the companies which left the town. It closed its cheese factory in Lichtenburg due to poor service delivery.

“The Lichtenburg factory has been experiencing water and power outages for years, and the municipality has not maintained the surrounding infrastructure,” it said.

“Despite numerous efforts to engage the municipality on these matters, the issues have not been resolved,” they added.

Businesses across the town also said they struggle to employ skilled talent, as very few people want to move to Lichtenburg, given its problems.

Ludick’s Uitkyk Vleismark and Ludick’s related businesses were some of the casualties of poor service delivery.

She told BusinessTech that the prolonged water and power outages forced her to close her three businesses and sell her commercial building for next to nothing.

“I left behind two houses and a block of townhouses for which there were no buyers. I lost millions of rands,” she said.

To add to her misery, she had to pay the Ditsobotla municipality R1.4 million for service charges in arrears before the commercial building could be transferred to the buyer.

“I used to be a rich and successful businesswoman who helped to build Lichtenburg. I am now a 65-year-old widow struggling to survive,” she said.

Today, the once bustling Uitkyk Vleismark building is a dilapidated building without much happening around it.

The story of Uitkyk Vleismark and Susan Ludick is a stark reminder of the impact of the government’s poor service delivery and mismanagement on ordinary citizens.

While the ruling party and corrupt politicians play political games and wrestle for power, businesses and people living in these towns endure tremendous suffering.