TOM EATON | Calm down, semigrants — Joburg isn’t so bad when seen from the back seat

Over the weekend, as I was whisked around an idyllically autumnal Johannesburg, something peculiar happened: I started seeing things the ANC’s way.

Of course there are usually rational explanations for supernatural phenomena, and at first I ascribed the change to the fact that I was in town to punt my new novel and was therefore thinking like a writer of comic fiction, that is, like an ANC policy adviser.

It was also possible, I speculated, that the high altitude was causing the change, the lack of oxygen giving me the giddiness and heart palpitations of a cadre with half a forestry degree applying for the tender to supply uranium to Koeberg.

As I acclimatised, however, I finally understood why everything seemed so pleasant: just like a cabinet minister, I was seeing Johannesburg from the back seat of a car. And the psychological effect, I can tell you, was profound.

In Cape Town, all we hear is that Johannesburg is dying. Admittedly, we usually hear it from recent semigrants from Gauteng, trying to convince themselves that they’ve done the right thing by moving into a house that’s slightly smaller than their SUV, but still, they tell a convincing tale.

Ensconced in the cocoon of the back seat, however, those tales seemed little more than doom-mongering. As we blasted down gloriously free-flowing freeways, now and then veering left or right (more of this in a moment), billboard after billboard revealed that business in Johannesburg is booming.

Granted, that business is online gambling, but the billboards’ unabashed confidence, their resolute refusal to acknowledge the misery they spread, filled me with the dopamine high ANC leaders must feel when they tell the punters to put everything on black, green and gold one more time despite everyone knowing that the house always wins.

But it was the total absence of potholes that most made me feel the bullish confidence of an ANC minister. Certainly, those occasional swerves to left and right kept happening, making my head bobble on my neck like that of an 82-year-old member of the NEC about to fall asleep during a speech on the importance of renewal, but, from deep within my revolutionary mindset, it was easy to imagine that the road was in perfect condition and we were simply jinking to avoid groups of children who had heard that we were approaching and had come singing and dancing into the street.

For years we’ve demanded that the ministerial class be stripped of its coddling luxuries so that it wakes up to the realities of the blight it has helped spread

To be fair, I did see one anomaly in the road ahead of us, when my driver said “Yoh” (which my cadre consciousness interpreted as shorthand for “Yohannesburg is doing so well under ANC rule”) and looked up.

The old me might have called it a crater, or a small geological upheaval, or what happens when the centre cannot hold and things fall about, mostly because the centre is Fikile Mbalula. But the new me saw the rich, red earth and the first pretty little green shoots pushing up through it, and saw only abundance, as if Yohannesburg was spontaneously growing a tiny farm right here in the street, a waystation to nourish its happy people as they trundled past on flat tyres.

For years we’ve demanded that the ministerial class be stripped of its coddling luxuries so that it wakes up to the realities of the blight it has helped spread.

Now I realise we might not even have to go that far: it turns out just getting our rulers to drive their own cars might be enough to bring them back to earth — or, if the pothole is particularly bad, about a foot under it — with a bump.