The Accidental Mayor. Michael Beaumont
day one, it became clear to us that the previous government, and those before them, did very little to arrest the serious problems confronting the city and its residents. They appeared more focused on travelling the world and perpetuating what we now saw to be the lie of the ‘World Class African City’. The job of leading the city was left to senior officials who had never stood for election and weren’t accountable to the public. This simply cannot be; senior officials who are not on the ground, who do not engage with the needs of communities and who, five years down the line, won’t appear on a ballot paper to receive a mandate should not be left to lead a city.
Cosmetic projects that seemed more suited to a corporate social responsibility programme were favoured, with government hoping someone else would take care of its core functions. There was a culture of ignoring the serious issues that faced the city and the difficult decisions required to take control of the snowballing backlogs. It amounted to deferring the city’s problems to the future, and we were now going to pay for this approach.
In the early days, Mashaba chaired a budget steering committee where a team of officials passionately presented a series of projects that they claimed would advance our job-creation agenda. They proposed mushroom farms and projects to convert stone into paper; solar-powered bread bakeries using mango flour imported from South America (to address the high salt content of normal flour). All dreamt up by city officials and social scientists as an approach to job creation. Of course, they would hand-pick the beneficiaries who were to own these businesses. The worst part is that they weren’t joking. My team and I cringed, knowing what was coming from the Capitalist Crusader.
When the presentation was over, a bewildered Mashaba asked the people in the room if he had woken up in Stalinist Russia. He lectured the officials, who had become befuddled by years of ANC economic policy confusion, explaining that we were not going to grow the economy by government creating businesses for which there was no demand and by hand-picking the people to run them.
Decades of experience had taught Mashaba what every businessperson knows, and most politicians and government officials seem unable to grasp: growing the economy requires government to get the basics right. Business in Johannesburg needed safety, the rule of law, sound infrastructure and a government that made the establishment and operation of businesses easier.
But first we had to know exactly what we were dealing with.
We got to work commissioning an assessment of the true state of Johannesburg, its backlogs and the full extent of the challenges we faced. Mashaba adopted the perspective that no plan to turn the city around could work if we didn’t know the magnitude of what had to be done. The results were eye-watering.
The housing backlog had grown to 300 000, conservatively estimated, and more than double this when we considered the missing middle of the market – those unable to qualify for Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing but also unable to obtain a property bond.
This was fast becoming one of the greatest problems, given the historical legacy of dispossession of land in our country. Communities were growing impatient as their elderly languished on a housing list 22 years after democracy. It manifested in daily land invasions. To truly appreciate the plight of land-dispossessed people, consider the desperation of the act of invading land that has no water, no electricity and no sewerage.
Over the past two decades of ANC government, the delivery of housing opportunities in Johannesburg had been a meagre 1 500 to 2 000 houses per year. This didn’t even keep up with the number of people arriving in the city every month from rural areas.
Tied into the housing issue were the informal settlements on illegally occupied land, of which over 200, most without any services whatsoever, dotted the landscape. The legal framework is not kind to local government in this regard. When people are to be evicted from illegally occupied land, court orders have to be obtained at tremendous cost to the city.
The Constitutional Court then requires the city to provide temporary emergency accommodation (TEA) to the evictees, which according to the Housing Act is supposed to be funded by provincial government. Good luck getting that money. To make matters worse, the TEA has no time limit and can effectively be indefinite. So when illegally occupied land earmarked for housing is cleared, the city has to provide accommodation to people who are often not eligible for housing in the first place, for an indeterminate period of time. When we took over, there were facilities in the city that had housed such people since 1997.
This had created two streams of housing in our city. The first, legitimate stream was a housing list with 152000 names on it, many of whom had been patiently waiting for housing since 1996. The other, court-sanctioned stream basically incentivised illegal land occupation, because anyone who did so could be rewarded with immediate housing, for an unspecified period of time, even if they were not entitled to state-funded housing. It is a clear example of how our judicial system has hamstrung government’s ability to do what it is supposed to do – deliver services in an open, transparent and fair manner.
In Mashaba’s first week as mayor, one of the communities took to the streets over their lack of housing and services. They did not care that it was his first week in government. Mashaba and I looked at each other in a sombre moment as it sank in that communities weren’t going to wait until tomorrow; they wanted change yesterday.
The city’s massive infrastructure had been allowed to decay, with minimal efforts to arrest the decline. The unfunded 10-year backlog stood at a staggering R170 billion. To put that into perspective, our capital budget sat at around R8 billion per annum. The backlog had grown exponentially due to the city spending four times less on repairs and maintenance than what is prescribed by National Treasury.
To convey this to the residents of our city, Mashaba used the analogy of servicing a car. If you ran the car without servicing it at regular intervals, its life would grow shorter and the cost of getting it back to optimal performance would grow larger. Now, instead of a car, consider this being the case for the entire electricity, water, sewerage and transport network in the largest city in South Africa.
Each year, 177 000 power outages took place, mostly arising from a power network sustained largely on hopes and dreams. Our study revealed that 27 per cent of our bulk transformers operated beyond 100 per cent of their useful lifespan, many of them older than my World War II veteran grandfather. Our backlog in electricity alone stood at R45 billion, as Johannesburg’s electrical network hadn’t expanded to keep up with the growth of communities over the past 30 years.
The 12000 kilometres of water pipeline leaked like a colander, with an average of 45 000 leaks and bursts resulting in 107 billion litres (or 40 per cent) of water being lost each year, costing the ratepayers an estimated R700 million per year.
When we came into office, Johannesburg was on the brink of a water crisis arising from a record drought that had brought dam levels down to 30 per cent. The last thing you want when you come in as a new government is to face a water crisis with pipes leaking and bursting all over the city. The water infrastructure backlog stood at R11 billion.
The condition of our road network was going backwards at a frightening rate, with a backlog of R12 billion. Over 4000 kilometres of our roads were classified as being in poor condition – that’s equivalent to the length of road between Johannesburg and Nairobi!
Of the 906 bridges in Johannesburg, only 6 per cent were in good condition. A whopping 78 per cent, more than 700 bridges, were in a state that suggested they might collapse in the future. I remember the faces of the residents at public engagements when Mashaba said, with unfaltering honesty, that if they drove under or over these bridges, they did so at their own risk. That certainly got everyone’s attention.
Levels of unemployment had risen by nearly 200 000 people in the previous five-year term to a total of just under 900 000. This amounted to 30 per cent in the broad definition of unemployment (including those who had given up seeking work), and over half of our youth were without work. Economic growth in the city had shrunk to 1.6 per cent, from a high of 8 per cent prior to 2007.
The previous government had all the studies that correctly assessed what was required to grow the economy. We knew this because when we came into office we