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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.
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 Swilling 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.
Read the full article on Daily Maverick here.