METROPOLIS OF BROKEN DREAMS: Joburg is too big to fail. It’s time to give it back to its people

I thought there were only so many times that Johannesburg city governors could break your heart. As a citizen of and ardent advocate for this excellent, bustling city, I find the maladministration visited upon it by administration after administration heartbreaking.

My mom, my family and the wider community are so abused that, even as rolling blackouts have mercifully stopped in the rest of the country, Joburg still suffers outages almost daily.

Water tankers race across the city as water shedding adds to our difficulties. Last week, we put in water tanks to add to the solar.

I laugh when I think of my disbelief when the Nigerian writer Azubuike Ishiekwene warned me decades ago that people would each have to become our own local government as service went down the drain.

“Not our Joburg,” I remember thinking. So naive.

On 18 May this year, many hearts felt sore when we protested against the Johannesburg library being closed for years. A small group organised by Defend Our Democracy, the tiny group of activists who hold progressive politics together so beautifully, made a big noise outside the library.

Professor Achille Mbembe, the storied scholar renowned for his work on the post-colony, spoke at a piece of public art to honour the role of women in the struggle. It is the centrepiece of Beyers Naudé Square, the open space of the library named after the beloved cleric who fought apartheid.

For years, the mandarins who nominally “run” the city have kept it closed. The park is rundown. A young woman, now with her own asset management company, came to protest. She said the library had allowed her to learn and dream when, as a learner, she visited and studied there. With her dad, they would have a Wimpy date and then he’d go to work and she’d go to study.

The Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, run by the indefatigable Flo Bird, has been a lone earworm for the city bureaucrats fighting for information about the library closure. The city officials exemplify the cruel bureaucrats of the post-colony that Mbembe has studied for decades. In the post-colony, and without deeper-rooted transformation, the new leaders mimic the cruelties of the colonial old.

Taking rather than giving

The people are forgotten as the new politicians climb over each other in a frenzy of extraction and taking, rather than giving. The promised revolutionary servant leadership never happens.

For years, somebody has got rich from continuing work on the library – claimed to be a fire risk, but with insufficient explanation of exactly how. 

I asked our colleague Brooks Spector what would happen if, say, the New York Public Library was closed inexplicably by city hall for years. What would people do? “There’d be running riots on the street,” he shot back quickly.

And yet, the tyranny of our lowered expectations of Johannesburg is so ingrained now that there are none.

The city has been repurposed for State Capture. In their path-breaking study of national State Capture, professors Ivor Chipkin and Mark Orkin explained how public sector systems, budgets and networks are repurposed for extraction. The patterns they identified were one of the processes that eventually led to the ousting of former president Jacob Zuma.

As a student of State Capture then and of Johannesburg governance now, the patterns are exactly the same. The city, with an excellent operating budget of R73-billion, a capital expenditure budget of R7-billion and numerous conditional grants from the National Treasury, should make it work for its people.

But you see how much is spent on contractors (R20-billion for services its staff should be performing) and read how it is misspent on vanity projects exhibited on the city’s social pages. The multiparty coalition is using contractors and positions on the entities to extract billions.

So, industrial extraction is now existential. Johannesburg needs R220-billion merely to get its water, energy and transport infrastructure back to basics, Bloomberg reported this week. The Metro Centre, the city’s lungs and heart for its citizens, stands closed after a suspicious fire.

Some staff and councillors believe it was arson to allow a massive “decant” into private office space that is costing billions. A cadre was set to get the deal until the National Treasury stepped in ahead of the election. I could go on for pages and pages.

But now Johannesburg is on the cusp of firing hapless Kabelo Gwamanda as mayor as the ANC at national level clicks how it lost the election primarily in the cities. Gwamanda is like a character from Can Themba’s story The Suit – an empty caricature of a mayor. He is the fifth mayor since the election in 2021, when no single party won.

Elected as part of a tortured compromise to create a coalition between the ANC and the EFF, Gwamanda is from Al Jama-ah, which has only three seats in the council.

He owes loyalty and fealty to his political bosses, but he needs to show no accountability to the people because they did not appoint him. In a callous display of this, he called citizens “stooges” in July when protests grew against the impact of sky-high electricity tariffs and charges.

According to my source, he will be out in a week, and the city will have its sixth mayor since the local government election in 2021.

As the place where gold was discovered and a metropolis shot up without a supporting river or body of water, Johannesburg is an exciting and storied city.

Rebuilding Joburg

The mayoral musical chairs is a political joke, but it’s not funny. Johannesburg is systemic for South Africa; it’s too big to fail. Too many people live here. Too much of the economy is concentrated here. Too much of our history is contained here.

It is going to take much more than a change of mayor to fix it. What does that fix look like? Fortunately, we know about it because of the work of Jozi My Jozi, the civil society and corporate programme to bring it back from the brink, and the Johannesburg Crisis Alliance.

Jozi My Jozi’s team has relit the Nelson Mandela Bridge and revamped the arterial on- and off-ramps into the city. In a major programme, its volunteers cleaned Hillbrow on Mandela Day. Ahead of the All Blacks game at Ellis Park at the end of August, a plan is under way to revamp and uplift the eastern inner-city area from Ponte to Ellis Park and further down.

The Crisis Alliance has tabulated and project-managed exactly what a fix of Joburg will require and how it should happen. The city needs to be put under national administration, like Durban’s eThekwini council. It is the only way to bring back the two cities from the urbacide (killing of a city) visited upon them by local State Capture.

In Joburg, this will entail a legal shake-out of the administration and entities such as City Power, Johannesburg Water, the Johannesburg Roads Agency and Pikitup, through which the city is ostensibly managed. Each one of them is a basket case, rendered so by decades of cadre deployment and extractive politics.

The neoliberal method of city management was meant to introduce business savvy into how Johannesburg was run. That project has long lost its way and introduced a level of bureaucracy that has removed the city from citizens in ways that are stultifying for service and opaque for residents.

And yet, Johannesburg lives and breathes and thrives. As publisher and cultural icon Laurice Taitz-Buntman says, it is, in fact, a metropolis of five cities. It insists on growing and jiving despite the poor governance that besets its basic skeletal infrastructure.

The city needs a government to suit its exciting citizens, who never stop doing wonderful things.

In the next month, Mandla Sibeko, the curator of the Joburg Art Fair, will lace across the city an arts megafeast that is on a par with anything in Dakar, Milan or New York’s best. Almost every week, if you browse Taitz-Buntman’s In Your Pocket guide to the city, you will learn of a new district, a fabulous artist and an entrepreneur starting up.

It is a generous city where soup kitchens, food gardens and WhatsApp groups share a spirit that has always been part of its identity and culture.

The fascia that holds the city together is outside its government now, and what the city needs from any change of political heart is to return Johannesburg to its people. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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