The Accidental Mayor. Michael Beaumont
sights. I would often witness his sorrow when returning from a raid. Dozens of people were crammed into small spaces without ablution facilities, in a building with no running water or power, and were charged rentals as high as R1 000 per month. Past attempts to deal with this problem had seen what Mashaba had termed ‘so-called human rights lawyers’ challenging the city’s efforts. It was his belief that these lawyers were in the criminal syndicates’ pockets.
It wasn’t long before the unit started producing results. By the end of 2017, council had approved the release of 84 buildings to the private sector for development into low-cost housing and student accommodation. They were a combination of city-owned properties and hijacked buildings that the city had reclaimed and secured ownership of, either because the outstanding municipal accounts were more than the value of the properties or the city was able to prove to the courts that the owners could not be located. It was a seismic achievement in a country grappling with decades of failed land-redistribution programmes and the prospect of amending the Constitution to allow expropriation without compensation. Mashaba was doing it all within the existing legal framework, at no cost to the state and in an urban environment.
The properties were put out on tender offering long-term lease agreements that kept them in the ownership of the city, but allowed the private sector to unleash their resources, creating world-class opportunities out of disastrous buildings. Along with this came job creation from a booming construction sector and the chance for Mashaba to implement a particular project that had become a focus for him.
Mashaba was well aware that artisan training had collapsed in South Africa. The average age of certified bricklayers, tilers, electricians and plumbers was over 45, with many approaching retirement age. There was simply no upcoming generation of artisans to take their place and government’s artisan training institutions had all but closed. As with so many things, Mashaba viewed the Inner City Rejuvenation Project as an opportunity to address this problem. The city initiated a programme through the University of Johannesburg, which began graduating 200 artisans each year, linked to the inner city project where they would gain the required experience in their newly learnt trades.
Mashaba made a mammoth investment in policing. Safety had become an issue in Johannesburg over the years, and a major driver of disinvestment. The city had deteriorated to the point where illegality was more easily found than a police officer. Mashaba pushed through a massive investment of nearly R200 million in the 2017 adjustments budget to initiate the recruitment of 1 500 additional JMPD officers, effectively increasing the metro police force by 50 per cent. It would take 18 months of training before these cadets could hit the streets of Johannesburg, but it would prove to be one of the greatest investments in the city.
In the meantime, the JMPD started becoming a serious crime-fighting force with the appointment of a new chief of police. In recruiting a chief, Mashaba knew he needed a real cop to establish a real police force. He found his man in David Tembe. Under Tembe’s leadership, the city launched Operation Buya Mthetho (‘bring the law’), a new multi-departmental operation aimed at enforcing by-laws and restoring the rule of law to the city. It addressed anything from illegal connections and building code infringements to environmental and health code violations. Almost overnight the JMPD became a force to be reckoned with, their presence on the streets expanding exponentially and raids occurring daily. Criminals were arrested in numbers never seen before, with more arrests taking place in a single year than the prior five years put together.
Committed to restoring the rule of law in Johannesburg, Mashaba applied himself to leading this task in ways residents had never witnessed in their mayors before. On more evenings than I care to remember, he would don his reflective vest and join the JMPD on their nightly Buya Mthetho raids. And he wasn’t the type to pose for photographic opportunities. He was the first through the door of whatever facility they were raiding; drug dens, brothels, illegal businesses, it didn’t matter. It drove his protectors crazy.
Anyone who chose to focus on the fact that he was a civilian and not a qualified JMPD officer had missed the point. Mashaba, through his efforts to lead from the front, played a key role in galvanising the JMPD under their newly appointed chief of police. Suddenly, metro police officers who had never seen a mayor before were being led through the doors by one. When one of them was hurt or injured, Mashaba was the first to their hospital bed.
I remember one occasion when I gave him the news that a JMPD officer had been shot and killed in the inner city, and that a manhunt was under way for the killer, who was holed up in one of the hijacked buildings nearby. I don’t think I had finished my sentence before he was out the door and on his way to join the efforts.
By the time he arrived, the JMPD had apprehended the suspect and locked him in one of their vehicles. To everyone’s surprise, Mashaba opened the vehicle and climbed in to interrogate him. When he climbed out, he had extracted from the suspect that he was a Mozambican national, in the country illegally. Another failure of national government to protect our borders had allowed a man into our country who had allegedly killed one of our brave JMPD officers.
This was the part about the commentariat’s approach to illegal immigration that riled Mashaba. They approached the subject academically. They were not there when he had to console the sobbing wife of that JMPD officer. They did not see the officer’s lifeless body lying in the street.
Mashaba spent a great deal of time with Operation Buya Mthetho. In one day he would cut off a business and collect a R20-million cheque for illegal connections to municipal services, shut down an illegal shebeen, raid a brothel and tackle a vendor selling expired food products. The programme was a massive success that had to be rapidly expanded.
This important work was backed by newly functioning municipal courts, set up through a funding arrangement with the national Department of Justice. Historically, by-law infringements would not see the light of day in our overburdened criminal justice system. The reintroduction of municipal courts, presided over by a magistrate and run by a team of city-appointed prosecutors, changed all that. By-law infringers began to appear before these courts under threat of arrest for failure to do so.
It began slowly, with a low prosecution rate arising from the need to train JMPD officers in writing citations and to design a new fines book correctly aligned with the magisterial districts, the two main causes of many of the cases being thrown out. The training of officers alone raised the prosecution rate from 4 per cent to over 25 per cent in a matter of weeks. Mashaba hoped to achieve a situation, over time, where the by-laws of the city mattered and were adhered to.
There was one related incident that drew a lot of public attention. Mashaba was not one to switch off his focus on the rule of law when he was off duty. It wasn’t a stunt; it was a necessity. One evening, on his way to a black-tie event, he drove past a man pushing a shopping trolley loaded with cow heads through the streets. The mayor instructed his protectors to stop the car and he proceeded to detain the man and his trolley on the basis that this was a clear violation of the city’s health codes in the handling and transportation of meat products, never mind the health risk to those who would later consume the meat.
The storm that followed his subsequent tweet about the incident was thunderous, with Mashaba being accused of trying to kill small businesses and hurting the livelihood of informal traders. It consumed social media and talk radio for days. He stood his ground, taking the side of the people who would have consumed that meat and potentially fallen ill and had to battle through an overburdened public healthcare system. Many took his side, but ultimately it was the EFF commander in chief, Julius Malema, who defended Mashaba most effectively. At a gathering of informal traders, Malema was unequivocal when he said, ‘It is our mothers and fathers who were going to get sick by eating that meat, and now we want to give this mayor a hard time for what he did. Mashaba was 100 per cent right.’ As would become a pattern, it was the EFF rather than his own party that came to his defence.
Mashaba’s approach to tackling Johannesburg’s drug problem went beyond targeting the dealers. He also initiated the first city-operated drug rehabilitation facilities in the history of Johannesburg. Previously the city had shrugged off the responsibility, citing it as a provincial government competency. Mashaba, like Johannesburg’s residents, didn’t care for passing the buck onto another sphere of government; he wanted action.