Sekhukhune Development Agency

SDA SHARING NOTES ON DAM MANAGEMENT, REVENUE AND AIRLIFT STRATEGY WITH UMHLOSINGA DEVELOPMENT AGENCY
DURBAN - While many delegates at Africa’s Travel Indaba 2026 focused on destination marketing and exhibition glamour, the Acting Chief Executive Officer of the Sekhukhune Development Agency (SDA), Dr Rosa Mdluli, spent the morning of 14 May 2026 engaged in a more calculated mission, identifying practical economic development models capable of transforming rural districts through tourism, infrastructure, and strategic state-owned entities.
Her destination of choice was the Umhlosinga Development Agency (UMDA), the municipal development agency of the deeply rural uMkhanyakude District Municipality in northern KwaZulu-Natal. For Dr Mdluli, the logic was precise: if Sekhukhune seeks to reposition itself through tourism-led development, it must study comparable districts that have successfully leveraged public infrastructure into economic catalysts.

The engagement brought together two influential women widely associated with the success and operationalisation of Mkhuze Airport Ms Musandiwa Cassandra Mulaudzi, Airport Manager of Mkhuze Airport, and Ms Thembisile Khumalo, Chief Executive Officer of UMDA. Their participation at Africa’s Travel Indaba 2026 presented an opportunity for cross-learning between two rural regions seeking to unlock economic growth through tourism and mobility infrastructure.

Mkhuze Airport, situated near the Ghost Mountains and close to major conservation areas, has quietly become one of the most strategic regional infrastructure projects in KwaZulu-Natal. Following upgrades to its 1.8-kilometre runway and the opening of a modern terminal building in late 2022, the airport now serves as a gateway to game reserves, conservation tourism routes, and cross-border access into Eswatini and Mozambique.

But what particularly interested Dr Mdluli was not merely the airport itself, it was UMDA’s governance and commercialisation model. The Agency directly manages and operationalises the airport while simultaneously using it as a platform to stimulate tourism, logistics, SMME development, and regional investment attraction. UMDA is now driving plans to elevate Mkhuze from a charter and general aviation facility into a fully-fledged regional airport capable of handling scheduled passenger flights.
The SDA has increasingly positioned tourism as a future economic pillar linked to De Hoop Dam, Flag Boshielo Dam, heritage tourism, eco-tourism, and rural cultural experiences. However, Dr Mdluli’s engagements at Indaba suggest the agency is also thinking beyond traditional tourism promotion and towards integrated economic systems, where infrastructure, air access, tourism packaging, logistics, and municipal development agencies work in concert.
“What stands out about UMDA is their deliberate use of infrastructure as an economic enabler,” said Dr Mdluli during engagements at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre. “They are not simply managing an airport. They are building an economic ecosystem around tourism, agriculture, transport, and regional mobility. These are the kinds of comparative models rural districts must begin studying seriously.”

UMDA’s participation at Indaba under the Route 22 – Elephant Coast tourism brand also reinforced how coordinated destination branding can strengthen global visibility for rural regions. The agency showcased safari experiences, conservation tourism, and local tourism enterprises while aggressively pursuing partnerships with international buyers and travel operators.

For observers, Dr Mdluli’s engagements reveal a broader strategic direction emerging within the SDA, one focused not only on tourism attraction, but on building institutional capacity for long-term regional economic transformation.
In many ways, Africa’s Travel Indaba 2026 has become more than a tourism marketplace for Sekhukhune. It has evolved into a comparative laboratory of ideas, where lessons on dams, airports, luxury tourism, and destination governance are being gathered with the intention of reshaping the future economic geography of the district.