JUSTICE MALALA | Like Emfuleni, we are swimming in the brown stuff here

Every so often, we must call things by their real names to illustrate just how much trouble we are in. This week, for the first time in a very long time, I am going to ask my editors to allow me to use a four-letter word that we polite, sensible, scribes try not to use in our writing. Yet a time comes when the sheer heartlessness, incompetence, corruption and hypocrisy of our leaders drives one to use such words. 

Last week a story that has appeared in dribs and drabs in publications across the country popped up yet again. A new, expansive, investigative piece by News24 said that sewage and water infrastructure across Gauteng’s Emfuleni local municipality has collapsed, “resulting in sewage gushing from broken municipal pipes into people’s homes, streets and into the Vaal river”. 

Let us put that in the kind of simple language that President Cyril Ramaphosa, his cabinet, and all citizens of South Africa can understand: s**t is literally floating down the streets in parts of Emfuleni. The news report added that this extremely harrowing, tragic, sad and dangerous situation continues while the municipality has failed to spend a R640m infrastructure grant and forfeited it to the National Treasury. 

In any other country the state of Emfuleni would have been declared an emergency back in 2015 when the municipality’s troubles began to intensify. For more than a decade, residents have pleaded with politicians to act. Pretty much nothing has been done.

The once-proud Vaal area, which encompasses the town of Vanderbijlpark and includes the townships of Sebokeng, Vereeniging and the historic Sharpeville, has become a slum. The Vaal river, once a clean, living, key tourist attraction, has been neglected. In 2021 TimesLIVE reported that the South African Human Rights Commission found that millions of litres of untreated sewage enter the river daily. 

After reading about Emfuleni, you would have expected President Cyril Ramaphosa to act swiftly (back in 2018 when he came to power) to ensure that the people of that municipality did not drink or cook with water with excrement in it. He showed that he does not care about these people by not raising a finger to resolve their problems.

Yet the president was suddenly awake and present last week in the City of Johannesburg where he proposed that a “presidential working group” be set up to fix the city’s service delivery problems. Why is he acting? Because he does not want to be embarrassed when world leaders descend here over the next year as part of G20 activities that culminate with the G20 Summit in November. 

Ramaphosa, who lives in Joburg and proudly jogs in its streets, has known for years that the city is collapsing. He knows that the city centre, where he goes every Monday for his ANC national working committee meetings, is a crime-infested, dirty, decaying shell of its former self. 

Only now, because Donald Trump and others might be coming, is he proposing a fancy team to deal with the city’s problems. In the meetings with Ramaphosa, Joburg mayor Dada Morero dropped this bombshell: “We will not disappoint you any further. As the people of Johannesburg, we are ready to host the G20 Summit. Johannesburg is the gateway to Africa and the rest of the world.”

The truth about Joburg is that it is led by people who don’t care for the city and its people. Ditto Emfuleni and others across the country

One is tempted to ask what, exactly, the mayor is smoking. The people of Joburg have been making huge noise for years about potholes, broken robots, chaotic billing, inner city decay, crime, corruption, and a whole plethora of things for years. Nothing has been done. Now the mayor says he will not disappoint Ramaphosa “any further”. 

What about the residents of Johannesburg? How about not disappointing them, doing one’s job, and cleaning up the city? 

Ramaphosa does not care about Emfuleni or any municipality under strain. Otherwise, he would have placed them under administration or strengthened them. The mayors of Emfuleni and Joburg and others don’t care about their residents, otherwise they would have acted ages ago. 

Like Emfuleni, we are swimming in the brown stuff here. 

How can Ramaphosa propose yet another task team to solve Johannesburg’s problems? In the five years between 2018 and 2023, Ramaphosa created a staggering 110 commissions, councils, funds, initiatives, programmes, summits, task forces and war rooms, according to Prof Jo-Ansie van Wyk, a political science lecturer at Unisa. 

What have they achieved? What will Ramaphosa’s task team on Joburg achieve? Nothing. 

The truth about Joburg is that it is led by people who don’t care for the city and its people. Ditto Emfuleni and others across the country. 

I would believe Ramaphosa and all our leaders if they started saying and enforcing something very simple: do not litter. They never do. They just never do. That one small failure has led to the s**t floating in the streets of Emfuleni and will lead to the same in the streets of Joburg. 

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