The Accidental Mayor. Michael Beaumont
from his predecessor’s international travel budget to fund this, as he had no intention of travelling around the world while trying to fix his city.
The informal settlement of Princess had no after-hours emergency health facility anywhere nearby. When Mashaba visited Princess during the election campaign, he met a family whose story moved him. The mother of the family took him by the arm and insisted that he come to see where they lived in a small two-room shack without a water supply. The eldest daughter had contracted tuberculosis and suffered from at least two fits per day. The mother explained to Mashaba how difficult it was to tend to her daughter’s medical needs while holding down the only job in the household, which was needed to put food on the table. It was apparent that this family suffered greatly. Mashaba’s interactions with the Princess residents revealed that many people were afflicted with respiratory illnesses and that access to healthcare was a problem for those who worked.
Extending the operating hours of their clinic was a pilot project to assess the feasibility of rolling out extended hours of service in clinics across the city. It was a huge success. There was an immediate outpouring of relief from residents who normally had to take time out from work to get the medical care they needed. Waiting times were cut in half and stories began to emerge of lives being saved that would have been lost if the clinics had been closed. No mayor had ever taken this approach before, but Mashaba recognised what was required. By the time he left office, municipalities across the country were engaging Johannesburg to replicate this project.
Another development involved the allocation of free water by the city. Our predecessors had allocated the first six kilolitres of water free to every household in Johannesburg. It did not matter whether it was a mansion in wealthy Sandhurst or a small home in Alexandra township. We changed this so that free water was given only to households below a threshold household income. By doing so we managed to increase the amount of free water to 15 kilolitres, while deriving additional revenue from those who could afford to pay for their first six kilolitres. It was a major pro-poor change that benefited hundreds of thousands of poor households, while moving away from universal free water, which is ill advised in a water-constrained environment.
Shortly before his 100 days in office, Mashaba launched the K9 Narcotics Unit of the JMPD, an elite force of metro police officers whose sole focus would be to wage war on the drug trade in Johannesburg. For years the drug trade had wreaked havoc on the city’s youth, feeding off the hopelessness of young people unable to find work. The South African Police Service (SAPS) had collapsed their specialised units, and there was a massive need to tackle the drug trade in the city. Communities had gone from desperate to angry as they witnessed how the police knew where the drug lords and dealers operated and yet failed to make arrests. When the odd arrest did take place, it was never long before the police docket disappeared and the dealers were back on the streets plying their deadly trade. And no one had ever done anything about it. The launch of the K9 Narcotics Unit represented the first real effort of the city to wage this much-needed war and the results began to roll in quickly.
Nearly every day in the first few weeks of his mayoralty, people came into Mashaba’s office with cases of government fraud and corruption. They had been sent from pillar to post under previous administrations, being ignored if they were lucky or victimised if they weren’t. Mashaba knew that corruption was a massive problem in the city he had inherited, but nothing could have prepared us for what started coming out. He began a process to locate the best person to head up a new forensic unit that would investigate these cases and ensure that wrongdoers were hunted down and punished.
Mashaba hated the fact that South African politicians plundered with impunity and then returned to communities with empty hands, saying there wasn’t enough money to meet their needs. In political circles, corruption was regarded as an efficiency loss that had to be lived with, but Mashaba wasn’t a politician. We did some investigation to locate a person with the integrity and ruthlessness required for the job. One name came back: General Shadrack Sibiya.
A former major general, Sibiya had had a distinguished career in the police. On 9 November 2016, Mashaba appointed him head of the city’s new Group Forensic and Investigation Service, tasked with investigating and rooting out corruption in government. At the time, no one could have imagined what this team would uncover in Johannesburg.
On 1 December 2016, Mashaba delivered a speech marking his 100 days in office, to report on progress achieved under the multiparty government. He spoke passionately of his commitment to rejuvenating the inner city of Johannesburg and converting it into a construction site. From the rubble, Mashaba said, we would raise a new inner city that would become a space for affordable housing and small business. He outlined how nearly every element of the 10-point plan had already been achieved. The city, for the first time, was moving in the right direction and it was being noticed.
My team and I watched from a distance, observing the response from the audience. We were encouraged as each statement was met with rapturous applause. His message was also well received by the media, who were beginning to warm to his mayoralty.
But the speech was not without controversy. Mashaba spoke about abandoned buildings in the inner city that had been hijacked by criminal syndicates and rented out, mainly to undocumented foreign nationals who had no other option. He had visited a number of these buildings and the conditions were deplorable. People were crammed into tiny spaces, without any electricity, water or toilets. Drugs and child prostitution flourished. In his speech, Mashaba referred to the ‘so-called human rights lawyers’ who fought against any effort by government to wrest control of the hijacked buildings from the slumlords of the city.
In the press conference that followed, a journalist from Power FM asked Mashaba what our efforts to fight crime meant for illegal foreigners. His answer was simple: ‘A criminal is a criminal.’ I saw all signs of joy disappear from the face of our then communications director, Tony Taverna-Turisan.
What followed was a week of some of the worst abuse I have ever witnessed in my political career, as one commentator after the next lined up to label Mashaba as xenophobic, afrophobic, populist and an instigator of violence against foreigners. The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) initiated an investigation into his remarks, and groups of protestors, organised by the ANC, began marching to our office every day.
Mashaba stuck to his guns. ‘If you are in this country illegally, you have broken our laws.’ He qualified this by saying, ‘I want the world to come to Johannesburg, to work, holiday and visit. But they must come here legally and once here, they must obey our laws.’ On this he refused to back down, despite the mounting pressure.
Mashaba had gone where angels, let alone South African politicians, feared to tread. Previously, any politician who’d dared speak about illegal immigration had either swiftly apologised or claimed their remarks had been taken out of context. Not Mashaba.
And why shouldn’t we talk about a problem that represents one of the greatest challenges to service delivery and the rule of law? By suggesting that we enforce our laws, which are widely heralded as progressive, are we really fuelling xenophobic violence? How can we seriously talk about the economy and the rule of law without addressing this issue?
What followed was an exhaustive programme of interviews. Mashaba responded to every media query, every attack and every interview request around the clock for a week and, importantly, he held the line. Over and over again he said, ‘I want every person in the world to visit Johannesburg, but they must come here legally and obey our laws.’ Journalists and talk-show hosts asked him: ‘Aren’t you stoking xenophobic outbreaks of violence?’ and ‘What do you have against foreigners?’ He kept his cool each time, insisting there are laws in our country and suggesting to the interviewers that perhaps their issue lay with the laws and lawmakers themselves, or perhaps they believed certain laws ought to be ignored.
But then, something interesting started to happen. Everywhere Mashaba went, ordinary South Africans would stop him in the street and say, ‘We are with you, you are right’ and ‘Thank God you were brave enough to say it’ and ‘Ignore them, they must come to Hillbrow and say it’s not a problem.’ It became a groundswell of ordinary people, from all walks of life, demonstrating how out of touch the country’s commentariat was with the views