The finance minister might be threatening Johannesburg with budget cuts but Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi and mayor Dada Morero are laser focused on one, all-important date: Sunday, November 23, the day on which the last G20 delegates fly home and everyone can go back to living off the largest but least publicised charity in South Africa.
This is not to say that the next few months are going to be easy. Sixteen weeks in ANC Time are barely two shakes of a cadre’s tail and certainly not long enough to hire a team of consultants to determine what a pothole is and whether it can be repaired by a company owned by your nephews or whether the scale of the problem might force you to approach your wife’s brother, too.
Still, Morero and Lesufi are resourceful men, or at least men who have access to resources, and they will know that there are sensible and practical things they can do to guarantee that the G20 delegates see a green, clean and vibrant city, like replacing all the windows on their tour buses with pictures of a green, clean and vibrant city, perhaps Kigali.
They will also no doubt remember the photo op in 2023 in KwaZulu-Natal when Cyril Ramaphosa basked in warm applause after he cut a ribbon at the inaugural turning-on of a single tap; and if they are wise they will spend the next 16 weeks each carrying around a tap that they can whip out and wave in front of the president to soothe him should he ever arrive and ask why those municipal workers over yonder seem to be miming digging a hole.
Imagine having spent the last year sitting behind your desk, pretending to run a city in return for a monthly donation, only to be told by a whole cabinet minister that it’s all real and you’re in trouble
How they pay for those two taps, however, is another matter.
On the weekend, the Sunday Times revealed that finance minister Enoch Godongwana has sent Morero a stern letter about the R24bn the City of Johannesburg flushed down its collapsing drains last year via unauthorised, irregular or fruitless and wasteful expenditure, warning Morero that if he doesn’t stop doing his impression of a tardigrade drifting snoozily in a dewdrop, Treasury will turn off some of the money taps.
One can only imagine the slow blinks as Morero read it out to his staff. Withhold money? What did that even mean? Why would an ANC politician withhold money from other ANC politicians? Or was it another way of saying Treasury would keep the money safe for a bit before it handed it over, perhaps in a special couch or something?
I’m making fun, but the truth is I feel for Morero.
According to residential property experts Lightstone, the average value of the average home in Johannesburg has not matched the national inflation rate at any point in the last decade: since 2016, homeowners have seen their largest asset depreciate in real terms by an average of over 3% every year.
In other words, there is a strong case to be made that the ratepayers of Johannesburg are now running an enormous charity, whereby they give away their own money, both through systemic, baked-in devaluing of their assets and the payment of rates and levies, so that the political class can eat.
Which is why, paradoxically, I can’t help sympathising with Morero.
I mean, imagine having spent the last year sitting behind your desk, pretending to run a city in return for a monthly donation, only to be told by a whole cabinet minister that it’s all real and you’re in trouble.
The shock must have been appalling. Still, if he can just hang in till November 23 when everyone goes back to sleep ...
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