Inside Joburg’s heart of darkness 

Our esteemed politicians should take a trip around the city with an Uber driver to really see how they’re failing residents.
4 mins read

Last week I was a guest at Woolworths’ annual Christmas event in Cape Town. Once a year, the company rounds up media, influencers, clients and suppliers to preview the mercurial, majestic and made from a lot of chocolate products that you’ll see in its stores in December. 

It is an incredibly upbeat day. Never mind the early appearance of mince pies, trifle and stocking fillers, it is an illustration of how exceptional South Africans are.

From the cool young Joburg, Durban, Gqeberha and East London influencers who descended on the Mother City and injected it with a dose of glamour and energy, to top local chefs like Vusi Ndlovu and Charné Sampson who cooked at the function, it is a five-star gig. The preview of “innovations” that the Woolies team is queuing up (think an entire Serrano ham joint with knife and stand as an Xmas gift) is a reminder that when it comes to many sectors, including retail, South Africans go head-to-head with the best in the world. 

You can’t get on a flight back to Joburg after that kind of function without feeling good. Descending into the City of Gold afterwards, I looked out the window and for a moment all was well in the world. Below me the landscape glittered like a jewellery box, with the lights of industry and arterial roads, and houses settling down for the night. That’s my town, I thought sleepily – and then we touched down and left the airport.

Into the abyss

Talk about hitting the ground with a sharp thud. In our Uber, taking the bend of the Geldenhuys interchange onto the M2 highway, we plunged into the most terrifying abyss. Yes – the highway lights from OR Tambo, Africa’s busiest airport, which welcomes 21-million passengers a year, are still not working. All the way along the strip into the biggest city in Southern Africa, no lights work. And they haven’t done for well over a year.

How anyone navigates that tangle of roads at speed, in the pitch black, without feeling nervous is beyond me. 

 “I’m used to it now,” our driver said, shaking his head in resignation. But his sense of defeat, at something which could so easily be rectified, triggered me. The poor man graciously put up with my railing against our populist Gauteng premier, Panyaza Lesufi, and underwhelming City of Joburg bosses all the way past Selby, along the M1, down the Empire Road offramp and into another flyover of darkness, and past the Milpark hospital. 

“We’re just going to have to hope that at some point we actually get a mix-and-match bunch of politicians who can do the job for the city. What else can we do?” he said, and shrugged – something of a mantra for the disempowered residents of a city that is slowly going feral.

 Like true frustrated Joburgers, we compared notes. He spoke of how his Ruimsig neighbourhood had intermittently had zero power for months because of cable theft. His West Rand community eventually put up cameras at their own cost to stop these criminals from nicking the lines.

 I mentioned how my friend who lives in White City, Soweto, had told me of her euphoria at getting power back for two days (and counting) in an area that has been electricity-less since November. Cynically, we pondered for how long the prepaid meters the city has now installed in White City would continue to work. 

Individually, you could argue these are all the sort of day-to-day problems you’d expect in any city, but a helicopter view quickly reveals that the dysfunction is way more systemic. This is precisely why people are abandoning Joburg for Cape Town in droves – over the past decade, for instance, the number of millionaires in Joburg has fallen 44%, while rising 20% in the Cape. 

And yet, the politicians haven’t noticed. 

So many excuses

Three weeks ago, Jack Sekwaila, the City of Joburg official responsible for the environment and infrastructure, seemed entirely nonplussed when opposition councillors put him on the spot about the water woes at the city’s Hursthill and Alexandra reservoirs, which have left so many residents without water.

“I’ve never in my office received this matter,” he said, arguing that nobody had ever told him of this. Critics weren’t impressed. “This was all over the news, on radio, and TV,” said Ferrial Adams, MD of water watchdog WaterCan. “I cannot believe you can be a politician in this city and not know about this.”

My Uber driver was just as irked. 

“What planet is Sekwaila on?” I exclaimed as our car dodged a cavernous pothole on Beyers Naudé Drive. The sentiment was only underscored when the drive ended and I arrived at my sister’s house in Montgomery Park, a suburb that had been without water for an entire day thanks to a “burst pipe”, still leaking water down the road at 10pm. No doubt the politicians wouldn’t have heard of that either.

My day in the Cape was a sobering reminder of how Joburg, and Gauteng, have been completely let down by the people running the show. The city has been overseen by a coalition since 2016, and it’s clear that all that has happened is that these leaders have focused on who is getting what portfolio rather than actually doing anything in that portfolio. They should be ashamed. 

They might read this (if they bother) and say, “Well, of course it’s another shouty northern suburbs white lady putting the knife in.” That has been their wont: so little self-reflection, so very many excuses. 

Rather than keeping their heads down while their blue-light brigades part the traffic for them, our politicians should try driving around, preferably with an Uber driver. Those professional chauffeurs hear and see it all – the decay, the stories of incompetence, desperation and disillusionment from everyone who lives in our province. Perhaps then, they’d realise this responsibility is all theirs – and they’re earning a salary, paid by these ratepayers, to fix this. They’re letting an otherwise talented country down badly. 

Top image: Clodagh Da Paixao/Unsplash/Currency.

Sarah Buitendach

With a sharp eye for design, Sarah has an unparalleled sense of shifting cultural, artistic and lifestyle sensibilities. As the former editor of Wanted magazine, founding editor of the Sunday Times Home Weekly, and many years in magazines, she is the heartbeat of Currency’s pleasure arm.

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