PATRICK BULGER | DOCTOR, DOCTOR: There’s a fly-by-night in my pothole

Recently, driving on Rivonia Road in Sandton, amid the glassy citadels of monopoly capitalism, I came across a vagrant who’d deployed himself to directing vehicles at an intersection whose traffic lights blinked randomly and uselessly through the rain-filtered afternoon light.

In this setting of neglect, he partially filled the crater left yawning, open and vacant by the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA), the municipal entity supposedly responsible (in the broad sense) for the upkeep of the city’s crumbling roads network, the lights and signs, the wonky bridges that threaten to collapse and the blocked drains that turn our roads into lakes when it rains.

To be fair to the City of Johannesburg and the JRA, it is impossible to ascertain with certainty nowadays whether a traffic light is not working because it is broken and awaiting “tender” loving care, or whether it has been rendered ornamental by load-shedding. Similarly with the roads: are sections washed away because of unusually heavy rains or because the repair job hadn’t been done properly? Or because the contract was given to a company that had never done the job before?

But here’s a clue. Earlier this year, Joburg Water, hardly a byword for efficiency and customer service, decided to contract out the finishing-up work needed when it has to dig up roads and pavements to attend to leaky pipes. It gives the job to private contractors now, rather than rely on the JRA as it did before.

Even as Joburg’s road network frustrates its unhappy users each day (with thousands of potholes, patchwork sidewalks and gratuitous ditches left unattended to), the JRA continues to distinguish itself as something of a finishing school for scandal and skulduggery.

This week, the JRA was back in the news and not for filling potholes. It appears that the CEO of the organisation, a Vaal University of Technology diploma graduate, Tshepo Mahanuke, may not necessarily be imbued with all of the illustrious academic qualifications he claims and which have until now embroidered his CV. These include a “doctorate” from an American Bible university and a further qualification from what was said to be a division of Harvard in the US. Yes, that Harvard.

Well, that didn’t take long. As recently as August, “Dr Mahanuke’’ was being welcomed to the JRA as the new broom who would sweep away all the troubles and scandals of the past, a chance to “press the reset button and usher in a new era of possibilities”, according to City of Johannesburg member of the mayoral committee Funzi Ngobeni.

When the dust has settled (or is it the mud in the case of Joburg’s roads?) the fact remains that “Dr Mahanuke” does indeed possess the minimum qualification for the job, though it may be a mystery to some that the board would have gone out if its way to appoint someone with the minimum qualification to what is presumably a vital post.

Ngobeni conceded, however, “that there are conventions governing the use of a title from an honorary degree that may have been broken and caused concern”. This may be a reference to the CEO’s regal habit of returning correspondence unread, which does not address him as “Doctor”, and just as no instance of lese majeste would be countenanced, no correspondence would be entered into either, which can’t have helped operations, such as they are at the JRA.

If our ruling upper nobility in the public sphere would put substance and performance above pomp and circumstance (which they won’t), something like the JRA should be a couple of floors in the city administration building. Instead, in line with dozens of similar jumped-up service-provider empires around the country, it’s “corporatised”, and boasts its own HQ, a board, a corporate-branding arm and its own pool of taxpayer money to dispense more or less how the politically appointed members of its board so choose. They probably have their own corporate golf day.

Take the mulligan allowed in applying BEE criteria. JRA guidelines note: “In exceptional circumstances a contract may, in reasonable and justifiable grounds, be awarded to a company who did not score the highest number of points” (for price and BEE). “The reasons for such a decision must be approved and recorded for audit purposes and must be defendable in a court of law,” it says. It’s a telling proviso that offers broad scope for manipulating tenders and cheating.

This style of pillage-by-governing is normally associated with the ANC, but the JRA, which now falls under the DA-led city, has in the past taken a multiparty approach on looting.

As reward for its co-operation in the DA-led city a few short years ago, the IFP was able to dust off one and recommission one of its big field guns, the inimitable Albert Mokoena, as chair of the board.

Mokoena, and who can forget this, was famously removed from his post as director-general of home affairs some years back when it was found he was running a basketball franchise from his offices. Years had done little to quell his habit for controversy when it came to the top JRA job. He was suspended in November last year, an inquiry finding he and other board members had involved themselves in the day-to-day running of the agency, “demanding tender specs and pushing for certain companies to get jobs”, all paid for by the JRA's R1.5bn budget.

Not to be outdone, the ANC deployed no less than one of its champions in this sector, a one-time Limpopo municipal manager, Republic Monakedi, as CEO. He hit the headlines in January 2109, when he said he was robbed by armed men at an office in Polokwane. According to sources, the amount in question was R5m which was intended for the ANC’s January 8 celebrations in Durban. At the time he could boast a starring role in crippling two municipalities before his unearthed vocation for roadworks came to the fore in September 2020.

The JRA is just one example of the dozens of our many jumped-up bureaucratic satrapies with large unpoliced budgets and politicians in charge. They are islands of profligacy and high living, ostensibly responsible for water, electricity, traffic management, air traffic control and other tasks that are really just governmental line functions. It’s a model that offers the perks of privatisation but none of the risk of losing one’s job if it were privatised.

No wonder we’ve got vagrants directing traffic and residents filling in potholes. Everyone else is just too busy.