TOM EATON | Will Joburgers care enough about their city to rescue it?

According to the finance minister, Johannesburg is bankrupt. So now we wait and we wonder: do a majority of Joburg’s citizens care enough to vote for radical change in November’s election?

I’m not sure the answer is yes.

To be clear, I know a great many Johannesburgers for whom it’s not even a question. There are few more hard-working missionaries than those true believers who take every chance to extol the many virtues of Johannesburg, waxing poetic and metaphysical about its moods and energies and dreamed-of futures.

When a Johannesburger puts their hand on their heart and tells you they could never live anywhere else, you know you are listening to an article of faith rather than a lifestyle choice.

For those who do leave, the wrench always seems to be particularly hard: those semigrants I meet in Cape Town, still pining for the people and skyscapes and culture of Joburg, often seem politely baffled by why they’ve deliberately chosen to live in my city with its rotten weather and provincial class snobberies and silly high school cliques.

No, when I say that I don’t believe Johannesburgers will act to save their city, I’m not talking about its urban evangelists.

I want Joburg’s citizens to do something remarkable in the local government elections, upending old voting patterns by coming out in their numbers to wrench Johannesburg out of this dismal, broken, eternal present in which it has floundered for so many years.

So are the rest of its citizens callous, apathetic wreckers?

Again, no. But we cannot keep repeating the fact that Johannesburg is the economic heart of this country without thinking about how that fact shapes the priorities of the people who move there and work there.

It’s always dangerous to generalise and trade in averages, but if we were to risk it for a moment and let demographic statistics create for us a single person to represent the average citizen of each of South Africa’s cities, two things would leap out at us immediately about the person representing Johannesburg.

The first is that the Johannesburger is younger than any of the other figures representing South Africa’s other cities. Young people move to Johannesburg to work, but many leave it to start families.

The second is that the Johannesburger is far less keen on voting than the inhabitants of other cities.

And fair enough: you don’t go to work to vote. You go there to make money.

I often feel that Cape Town is still what it was at the beginning: a small-souled, ungenerous outpost where the sick and the unambitious rest and recover from the diseases associated with travel and commerce.

Johannesburg, on the other hand, has evolved from being a muddy hole full of money and ambition to become a gigantic office block containing 6-million people.

Yes, it’s got some great recreational facilities and some nice green spaces between the buildings, and the food court is great, and there’s a good vibe between employees, a vibe entirely missing among the curtain-twitchers of Cape Town. But it remains a single, vast commercial object, built nowhere near a river or the sea or any of those places where cities naturally develop. For millions of its inhabitants, it is, ultimately, a place where they live to make money so that their real lives can happen elsewhere.

Which is why I remain sceptical about Johannesburg’s willingness to vote in large numbers for something radically different.

It’s not that office workers don’t care about the building that houses them. Most do. But they don’t consider it their job to keep their building functioning. That’s someone else’s job, and they’re not entirely sure who. Even knowing who isn’t their job. Their job is to show up and work and get paid, and they’ll do that even when the front door is falling off its hinges and two of the four lifts have become unusable.

Of course, if the building becomes too rickety to work in or the water or electricity gets cut off, they’ll have to make a plan and find a job in another company. But that’s part of the modern working world: you go where there’s work. And they certainly won’t hang around wondering how they can fix their old office block.

I want to be proved wrong. I want Joburg’s citizens to do something remarkable in the local government elections, upending old voting patterns by coming out in their numbers to wrench Johannesburg out of this dismal, broken, eternal present in which it has floundered for so many years.

I want them to install a coalition government that chooses investment and delivery over extraction and contempt. I want them to prove that Johannesburg is a home for people and not just a stop along the way.

Many residents want the same. But how many? And will they vote?

That is the question that will be answered in November.