As Johannesburg’s new ANC-controlled council gets to work, drawing up lists of the most aerodynamic chairs and the best water jugs to use in hand-to-hand combat, I’m not sure who I pity more: the residents of Joburg or its new mayor.
By now you will have read about Al Jama-ah’s Thapelo Amad, or watched the awkward clip of him announcing his big focus during his term is going to be fixing potholes, looking like an earnest and well-meaning grade 6 pupil arguing that climate change can be halted if households recycle.
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To say he looks out of his depth is an understatement. At the best of times, managing the running of a city of 6-million people requires extremely specialised skills. But managing that city as it collapses into ruin, while sitting on a council controlled by the party that specialises in urban collapse, well, I’m afraid that takes more than Amad has to offer.
At first glance, it’s hard to grasp how the country’s premier city, and by far its biggest headache, is being headed by the member of a party which won 31,468 votes in the 2019 general election. That’s like the deputy cupcake-baker for the PTA of a primary school in Springbok suddenly being appointed minister of education. Wait, that’s a terrible example: I think we can all agree a mild-mannered cupcake-baker from Springbok would do a much, much better job than Angie Motshekga.
Still, you get my gist.
To political pundits, it’s less surprising. This week some have insisted Amad was specifically parachuted into the position as a useful “puppet” who will rubber-stamp the shady dealing of the ANC and its alliance partners. Certainly, the publicly devout Amad would have felt a particularly hollow sort of helplessness in the pit of his stomach on Thursday when he watched Kenny Kunene, former criminal turned nightclub owner turned fake news media mogul, being sworn in as a councillor.
He wasn’t the only one. While estate agents along the Garden Route are no doubt celebrating the continued flight of semigrant money out of Gauteng, everybody else will be staring in horror and wondering what the residents of that blighted city have done to deserve this latest disaster.
Even I, living in Cape Town, have felt a shiver down my spine. Blessed with a competent administration and a high-lying hydroelectric dam that can often shave a stage off load-shedding, this city feels a world away from the omnishambles that is Joburg. Yet the events of this week should be a reminder to everyone, in every province, of what could happen after 2024 when coalitions, red in tooth and claw, start using entirely legitimate democratic processes and principles to carve up new fiefdoms and find new and exciting ways to shaft the people of this country.
Last week Amad told the press “in 100 days you’ll see a difference” in Joburg.
To some, this would have sounded like naiveté; to others, the same hollow promises. I think Amad spoke the truth. I think Johannesburg will definitely be different three months from now.
For starters, it will be May, not February, and it will be raining less.
Also, Amad will no longer be mayor.
The more things change, eh?
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