If you fly into Cape Town on a Friday night and spend a whole weekend sipping cocktails in Camps Bay and the Waterfront — before flying back on Sunday night — you might leave the Mother City having not witnessed the sewer that runs down the streets of Khayelitsha.
The Khayelitsha version of Cape Town is the part of our country that our government wants to hide from visitors. That is why Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero told reporters that his government will prioritise delivering services to the routes used by our visitors who will attend the G20 summit in November this year.
“We are doing our best. We’ve prioritised certain routes within Johannesburg which are G20 routes to ensure we make them the standard they should be: no potholes, no traffic signals that aren’t working. We’re focusing on that,” he told reporters at the launch of the Urban 20 summit in Johannesburg on Monday.
Morero has since sought to correct his statement — saying it was a matter of language used in that presser, but his government is committed to providing services all over Joburg.
We need to pray that another prominent person from Nkowankowa dies for us to get better service delivery.
— Noel Chauke, local Tzaneen man
It is now a norm that when a big event is approaching, our government unlocks resources that we all thought did not exist to spruce up the hosting areas. This publication has written numerous stories about the sudden cleanup efforts that take place whenever the president is scheduled to visit an area for a government event.
It’s an undisputed truth that most of the public infrastructure, including improved freeways, would not have been built if it wasn’t for the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Because we were expecting visitors, the government deliberately decided to invest in infrastructure that outlived the World Cup. It is not because our government wanted to show off, but it is because there was political will to invest.
This is not unique to Gauteng but happens sometimes elsewhere across the country. When former finance minister Tito Mboweni was to be buried in Tzaneen last year, the roads leading up to the Nkowankowa stadium, where his funeral was to be held, were patched at the last minute on a Friday and the potholes were fixed. This evoked a heartfelt quote from a local man, Noel Chauke, who said: “We need to pray that another prominent person from Nkowankowa dies for us to get better service delivery.”
Why do leaders only resolve problems when they are going to benefit from the fixes or do they want to appear as though they are doing something? Why are Morero and his team not fixing the other parts of Johannesburg every day as part of the job we elected them to do? The disconnect between our politicians and the people who voted for them is expanding daily.
Even though a huge majority of Morero’s colleagues may have grown up in townships — where there are constant water shortages, frequent load reduction, unmaintained roads and dysfunctional traffic lights — Morero and his colleagues are oblivious to such problems. Most of our politicians only visit such communities during the election campaign season — and throughout the next five years spend their time in G20 route areas. Unless we have an active citizenry to hold our politicians accountable to make sure all our areas receive the same treatment as G20 routes, the likes of Morero will continue to provide services on special occasions.
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