Fikile Mbalula says he wants to “Make Johannesburg Great Again”, perhaps right after he has told Chef to Make Eggs Benny Great Again and recommitted himself trying to Make Spelling Your Boss’s Name Correctly Great Again.
That last gaffe happened on Saturday, as the man who currently fills the shoes of Sol Plaatje (or at least spends his days curled up in the small hollow created by Plaatje’s left baby toe) tweeted that, while he wanted to MJGA, he didn’t mean it in the Trumpian sense.
No. Instead of “referencing a distant past” longed for by consumers of “right-wing propaganda”, Mbalula explained, he was talking about “recent [times?] under a stable functioning government of an ANC majority which we urge voters to bring back”.
Perhaps to drive home his message of stability and excellence, he added a final flourish: “#LeadUsRamaphodaInJOZI”.
For the sake of balance I should admit that it is not entirely fair to judge Mbalula on the things he writes, or says, or does. On the contrary, we should always approach him with some sympathy, and understand that he is a lively soul chained to a brain that, like Mr Toad seeing a new car, is often overwhelmed by the urge to go “Poop poop!” and roar off into the distance simply for the thrill of hearing that glorious noise and seeing people or facts or logic dive out of the way.
It is quite possible, therefore, that when he wrote “Ramaphoda”, he had temporarily forgotten the name of his president, or had confused him with Yoda — shocked the president is — or, indeed, was thinking of someone else entirely, perhaps a grizzled tracker named Cyril Ramaphoda whom Mbalula was hoping to hire to lead him out of Johannesburg, guiding him on a sure-footed little mule over the crumbling moonscapes of its streets or across the rushing rivers of its pavements.
Mayor Dada Morero, low expectations made flesh, also chimed in, explaining that he would be submitting his team’s action plan to the president on Wednesday, because, as everyone knows, the best time to ask a president to read your science-fiction short story is on the same day his fractious cabinet has grudgingly agreed to allow the finance minister to deliver the renegotiated budget.
It's also impossible to tell whether, when he suggests that Johannesburg was “great” from about 1994 until about 2016, he understands what the word actually means or whether he’s simply trying to rebrand mediocrity, entropy and atrophy as proof the ANC’s success. (“Comrades, behold all the greatness, bursting stinkily but robustly out of those great sinkholes! Behold how the greatness gleams as it bobs greatly away down towards that great copse of thorn trees growing out of the middle of that great former traffic intersection!”)
What is clear, however, is that the ANC has finally understood that it needs to clean up Johannesburg if it is to avoid the worst possible outcome for it and its leaders, namely, someone from the Russian delegation at the G20 meeting in November stepping in some ankle-deep greatness.
At least, that was the subtext as Ramaphosa entered the fray late last week, speaking at length about how important it is for Johannesburg to put its shoulder to the wheel and build the best Potemkin Village the national debt can buy.
Mayor Dada Morero, low expectations made flesh, also chimed in, explaining that he would be submitting his team’s action plan to the president on Wednesday, because, as everyone knows, the best time to ask a president to read your science-fiction short story is on the same day his fractious cabinet has grudgingly agreed to allow the finance minister to deliver the renegotiated budget.
Of course, we understand why Ramaphosa has opted for window dressing and Morero is doing his best to bury his proposals under the budget news cycle: fixing broken cities is hard. Even those that “work” are largely dependent on the economic health of the country that surrounds them, and once you travel out from their famous, impressive centres, you often reach parts that don’t seem to be working for anyone except slumlords and gangsters.
For Ramaphosa, a Johannesburg that works is one that doesn’t alert the international press to the fact that his government has been in power during the Detroitification of Africa’s richest city, but for the citizens of that blighted place — and for those of us who live in other cities — the decline and imminent collapse of Johannesburg is far more than a political crisis.
I know there are some who disagree, and who watch the unfolding mess with a frisson of schadenfreude, using it to justify their dislike of the ANC or any of the coalition members who’ve failed to slow the fall. For others, who have sold up and moved away, there’s a mixture of sadness and relief.
I understand these responses, this feeling that there is a ring-fenced, firewalled entity called Johannesburg, and then everything else: cities are great separators, segregating us, keeping us in our lanes, sorting us according to race and income and social capital.
But none of us are alone. We are all connected. And if Johannesburg’s misery tips into genuine collapse — the sort that sees capital flee and the middle class dump its properties for 60 cents on the rand, then 50, then 25, the whole country will feel that earthquake. Banks will collapse. The jobs bloodbath will reach the middle class.
And if Capetonians think their city is too expensive to live in now, just wait til they’re competing with half of Gauteng for the last bachelor flat in Clanwilliam.
No, the fall of Johannesburg is a very big deal. How frightening, then, that the people tasked with fixing it should be so terribly small.
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