The Accidental Mayor. Michael Beaumont
The opportunity to take more control over how the city’s budget was spent came with the adjustments budget in February 2017. This was the first chance the multiparty government had to move funds around within a budget approved by the ANC before they were voted out.
This was a crucial moment in Mashaba’s mayoralty and he was dreading it. It marked the first test of whether he could find enough common ground with the EFF and his coalition partners to agree on how the city’s budget should be spent. It was a daunting task because of the probability of six different political parties producing a budget that would secure the support of the EFF while simultaneously addressing their own requirements. The budget had to address the massive expectations for change that had arisen across the city, and, because of the city’s dire revenue situation, such change would have to arise from within a declining financial envelope.
We got to work. Sessions were organised throughout the day and night for nearly two weeks. Through caffeine-fuelled meetings, we were able to identify enough non-essential government programmes and budgets to make the necessary cuts to fund change across the city. When the time came to pass the adjustments budget, we had workshopped our approach extensively with our partners and the EFF. They had made their inputs and, frankly, enriched the pool of change with many ideas of their own. Nevertheless, it was a stressful process.
When the vote took place, the ANC and its partners voted against the budget, and I could see Mashaba watching the EFF out of the corner of his eye. Their hands stayed down. Next came the call for those in favour, and the coalition and EFF raised their hands in unison. It was a massive victory for our programme to deliver change in Johannesburg.
While there is no question that the odds were stacked against us, it became clear that Mashaba was the right man to turn the city around. His ‘business unusual’ approach was starting to pay off. He took joy in witnessing his programme of governance being delivered and in being on the ground with the people and communities benefiting from this work. For him, an event to deliver services was not a photo opportunity or a PR exercise. He wanted to connect with people, bring change to their lives and hear their stories so that the work of government could be informed by their lived realities.
One such initiative was extending the operating hours in more city clinics, following the successful pilot study at the Princess Clinic, where waiting times had come down and every month thousands of patients were able to come in after work to receive treatment or chronic medication. With the adjustments budget in February 2017, Mashaba was able to roll out this programme, a first in South African local government history. By the end of 2019, some 26 clinics had extended their operating hours to serve communities until late at night and over weekends, with plans to expand the project every year until it was standard in every city clinic.
The adjustments budget, in what became known as the ‘no-join policy’, was also used to fix a major problem that affected the Johannesburg road network. Over the years, faulty traffic-light cabling in the most congested city in South Africa had been repaired by simply joining the cables together to fix the faulty section. As any electrician will tell you, a joint in a cable becomes a weak point that will fail whenever you have heavy rain or one of Johannesburg’s impressive summer electrical storms. So a no-join policy was brought into effect, which required the cabling under the busiest traffic intersections across Johannesburg to be dug up and re-cabled. The results soon spoke for themselves, with a 76 per cent reduction in traffic-light downtime and Johannesburg receiving an award for reducing traffic congestion.
Hundreds of millions were ploughed into electrifying informal settlements, providing affordable rental housing and completing over 3000 RDP housing units that had been left unfinished for many years. I can only imagine what it must be like for someone who has been on the waiting list since 1996 to live in an informal settlement overlooking RDP houses that they know will never be completed.
Slovo Park, an informal settlement on the outskirts of the city, had not benefited from post-apartheid government intervention for 21 years, leading residents to approach the courts. As a community they had sued the City of Johannesburg’s previous government and the Gauteng provincial government to provide them with services. In a landmark judgment in 2015, the court had found in their favour and instructed government to intervene and provide services.
When Mashaba entered office, we found that there were no plans to implement this court ruling. So, arising from our engagements with the EFF, Slovo Park was deemed a priority and plans were developed. In early 2017 Mashaba flipped the switch, powering this informal settlement with electricity for the first time. He was invited into the modest home of an elderly resident who had bought a kettle in anticipation of this moment, and she used it to make him a cup of tea. She must have been 80 years old and her weathered face reflected many years of hardship. She wore an ANC-branded doek. While sipping tea together, she turned to Mashaba and said, ‘Do you know, today is the first day that I feel like a human being.’
Imagine surviving the oppression of apartheid, standing in those long, snaking queues in 1994 to vote for the very first time and living in a community named after the great anti-apartheid stalwart Joe Slovo, only to be forced to go to court and sue the new government, 21 years later, to receive the benefits of democracy.
Another major achievement in those early days was the Inner City Rejuvenation Project. Mashaba had identified the vast potential of the inner city of Johannesburg and was convinced that it provided an opportunity to address some of the city’s greatest challenges. He often spoke about turning the inner city into a construction site with a view to building low-cost, affordable accommodation and spaces for small businesses. When he compared the city’s capacity to build a measly 1 500 to 2000 houses per year with the massive potential of the collective balance sheets of the private sector, he realised we could be hitting on a second gold rush.
The inner city had the potential to address the spatial inequality in the metro by providing housing opportunities to people who had lived on the geographic and economic periphery of Johannesburg for decades. These people would typically spend between 40 and 50 per cent of their limited household income on travelling across the city in search of work opportunities. Mashaba wanted to bring them closer to opportunity and create the kind of density in the inner city that would generate the demand required for economic activity to boom around it. The inner city had the added advantage of established infrastructure, which would negate the need for bulk infrastructure installations for new developments on the periphery of Johannesburg.
However, for the inner city to have any chance it needed to be a more attractive environment, a place where people wanted to live, work and play. Mashaba’s anger and disbelief at how previous governments had allowed the inner city to decay into an urban slum were palpable. Filth and lawlessness had taken root.
To begin to tackle the problem, an additional midnight cleaning shift was introduced, at a cost of R50 million, and the inner city began to look a lot cleaner. This went along with a massive increase in the presence of the JMPD, with visible policing almost quadrupling. The inner city still had many challenges, but it was a start that people began to notice. The entire Inner City Rejuvenation Project had its origins in this particular achievement. On the back of this, a vigorous programme of engagement with the private sector in the inner city started to generate confidence.
Our biggest challenge came from the criminal syndicates that had swooped in and hijacked buildings. They were making a fortune by charging people obscene rentals for abhorrent conditions. They had done so with impunity under the lawlessness that had been allowed to manifest for years, and had driven many legitimate property owners out of the inner city. As mentioned earlier, many of their ‘tenants’ were undocumented foreign nationals who had no recourse, given their status, and were vulnerable to this kind of abuse.
Mashaba initiated a programme of raiding these hijacked buildings, using a team set up solely for this purpose within the new forensic unit. He would regularly accompany them on these raids,