How 'do-gooders' are fixing Joburg

I looked at Mandla Radebe, feeling very confused. "I'm sorry, Mandla," I said, shaking my head, "but I just can't figure out why you did that. You're a builder - what you did was not something that builders are supposed to get involved in."

This was a couple of weeks ago and I'd just met Mandla at a small block of flats in Hillbrow, which he and 15 men from Immaculate Painters & Renovators were renovating. The building consists of 29 small apartments but, like so many Hillbrow blocks of flats, it had been virtually hijacked, deteriorating to a near-uninhabitable state.

Mandla was the project leader on the renovation, which was being paid for by the building's new owner. He and his team were getting a move on because the owner (a municipal employee) needed the building ready for occupation a month after Immaculate came on site. This was a tall order because the renovation entailed redesigning the layout, installing a new fire escape and building communal washing and bathroom facilities, not to mention fixtures and a new coat of paint.

As the builders worked, the people living there had to leave - and Mandla had just been telling me how he'd helped arrange meetings aimed at persuading the tenants to move out (they were promised first right of refusal to lease the new fixed-up flats).

"You know the phrase, 'It takes a thief to catch a thief?'" Mandla replied to my question about why he was involved in negotiations of that sort. "Well, that's why I was at the meetings; I know these people. I know their circumstances, where they're coming from, what they're thinking. They feel more comfortable dealing with me than someone they might consider an outsider."

As well as overseeing a team of renovators, Mandla explained that he was an estate agent and owned a few flats himself. He also told me about how he had nearly completed a pharmacy degree at the University of the North when 1976 happened, and how he had spent almost a year in detention.

I thought of my conversation with Mandla when my learned colleague David Shapiro suggested in his column last week that Johannesburg should be rebuilt "block by block".

Bemoaning "years of neglect, incompetence and mismanagement", Shapiro compared poor old Joburg unfavourably with such shiny metropolitan successes as New York and Singapore. Of course everyone knows that in recent decades downtown Joburg has become an overcrowded crime-infested national embarrassment.

But today the Joburg inner city really is being pulled up by its bootstraps - and it is entrepreneurs who are doing the pulling. Perhaps most encouraging of all, it is entrepreneurs of all colours, all classes and ages and both genders who are putting in the hard work, the capital and the risk that is required.

I met Mandla at the behest of the Trust for Urban Housing Finance bank. The first part of the name is a bit of a misnomer because TUHF isn't a trust at all. It is a solid business that generates solid profits by putting up the money entrepreneurs use to invest in inner city low-income housing.

Just over a decade old, TUHF was founded by a bunch of self-described housing "do-gooders" and it retains its missionary zeal (to be "a good business doing good") but its financials tell of a very sustainable, well-governed banking business that has put serious cash (over R2-billion) into the city. Its success rests on financing one building, one entrepreneur at a time and then, unlike traditional banks, staying close to its entrepreneurial clients and their investments.

You don't hear about all the good things going on in downtown Joburg - about all the bad neighbourhoods being turned into good neighbourhoods, about the entrepreneurs turning terrible buildings into good buildings - because it's happening under the radar.

Instead, David, one of the great unsung success stories of SA is happening a couple of million bucks at a time, just like you suggest, one building, one block at a time.