Johannesburg has always been a brutal bastard of a city. Founded in 1886, after the discovery of rich seams of gold in the area, it attracted fortune hunters, scamsters, pimps, criminals, lawmakers, journalists, adventurers, labourers, chancers, and all manner of other humanity.
For a hundred years it thrived, but like all SA it did so on the back of oppression and dehumanisation of blacks who provided the labour that built it into one of the world’s great modern cities.
In his classic 1971 poem City Johannesburg the great poet, Mongane Wally Serote, mocks the city with this opening salvo:
“This way I salute you:
My hand pulses to my back trouser pocket
Or into my inner jacket pocket
For my pass, my life,
Joburg City.”
From this reference to the dreaded pass book that all blacks had to carry in the city, while their white fellow citizens prospered and lived freely, he details the hunger, the long working hours, the underdevelopment of the townships, the crime and grime. By the end, you know Johannesburg is a brutal house of horrors: “There is no fun, nothing, in it ... Joburg City, you are dry like death.”
The struggle, since 1994, was to make Johannesburg a place that all could call home and in which all could prosper. For many of us, there is no home but this frustrating, ugly, beautiful, sometimes decaying, sometimes hopeful, place.
So, for many of us, Jozi, Johannesburg, or the City of Joburg as it is now called, must work — or else SA will not work.
Yet, after the collapse of the DA-led coalition government of Mpho Phalatse on Friday and the installation of the ANC’s Dada Morero as mayor, the rebirth of Johannesburg has been pushed out to a far distant future. My prognosis is that Joburg is going to get far worse before things get better. That is because we all know how the ANC operates. And now the ANC in Johannesburg is desperate.
Only the cluelessness, greed and juvenile infighting of the opposition returned the party to power in the city last Friday.
If you want to know what the future of Joburg looks like, you only have to glance at the results of the local government elections over the past three polls. The ANC only won 33,7% of total votes cast in November 2021. In 2016, the party’s haul was 44,5%. In 2011 it was 58.5%. These results tell us that, save for a miracle of some sort, the ANC has no future in Joburg.
Only the cluelessness, greed and juvenile infighting of the opposition returned the party to power in the city last Friday.
As indicated, we know the ANC. We know how it behaves once in power. What we are about to see in Joburg is how the ANC behaves in power when it is assured that its trajectory is downward, and that it will never don the mayoral chains ever again except by subterfuge. It will loot.
ANC leaders view state property and resources as their personal belongings. Look at the former defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula’s conduct as outlined by the acting Public Protector on Friday. She brazenly, illegally, used a state jet to fly ANC leaders from Zimbabwe to SA without any thought that this was pure enrichment of the ANC. This one anecdote illustrates a wider point made many times at the Zondo commission: the ANC and its leaders use state resources for their own personal enrichment or the advancement of their party.
Over the next few months and years, the ANC in Joburg will put its foot down on the looting accelerator. It will reward those small parties that have colluded with it to put it back in power with positions and city contracts to keep them onside. Many of its leaders will do their best to fill their boots before the big axe of the next local elections falls on the party’s neck and it gets something around 23% of total votes cast.
Now, one might say that the ANC’s national leaders will intervene and try to get their subordinates in Joburg to run a pro-people administration instead of choosing corruption, misplaced cadre deployment, and so many other tricks in its looting handbook. After all, you would say someone like Cyril Ramaphosa heard the people’s cries when he was booed and threatened in his childhood neighbourhood of Chiawelo, Soweto, last October. You would be wrong.
The ANC May claim to be a unitary structure but it has become very federal. In Gauteng the party is already negotiating 2024 coalitions with the EFF. The same thing is happening in KwaZulu-Natal.
In essence, the party’s junior leaders in the cities and provinces are doing what they want to stay in power. Ramaphosa and his senior colleagues are nowhere near being able to intervene. In Johannesburg, should they try to say a word, they will be threatened with withdrawal of Gauteng’s support for party positions in December.
Mongane Serote’s City Johannesburg is set for some hard, brutal, looting times ahead.
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