Joburg’s road to hell

You can’t say Dada Morero didn’t warn us. Right after his mayoral acceptance speech a year ago, he told News24 not to expect much by way of improvement while he’s in charge of the country’s biggest metro.

“Remember, we won’t be able to do too much in the next two years,” he said. 

Yet a lot can happen in a year – never mind two. At least, a glance around the city would suggest so. Think increasingly pockmarked roads, nonfunctional streetlights, dysfunctional traffic lights, fast-disappearing road markings. Those are the easy fixes. Then there are the sliding, cash-sucking city entities, the unchecked infrastructural decline – water and roads utilities that are about as effective as a square wheel – and the rampant corruption.

Still, there’s a difference between not expecting much of a mayor and watching him preside over the kind of mess that makes a fetid rubbish dump look positively sanitary.

Take former Joburg Property Company head and former acting Joburg COO Helen Botes. Earlier this month, the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse brought a case for her to be declared a delinquent director. Joburg spokesperson Nthatisi Modingoane, with the kind of alacrity that is vanishingly rare in the city, told Daily Maverick a whole week later that Botha no longer occupies any position in the city.

Only, the truth in this instance would seem to be infinitely elastic. For starters, the DA claimed Botha continued to advise Morero. And Daily Maverick’s Ferial Haffajee reported this week that Botha was spotted at a meeting of Morero’s own vanity project, the “bomb squad”; she is, apparently, consulting to the city.

Botes, Haffajee was told by bomb squad head and SABC-snuffer Snuki Zikalala, brings her immense knowledge of the city to bear in her consulting role.

Now, that Botes is allowed anywhere near the city’s administration is right up there with Jacob Zuma once leading the country’s “moral regeneration movement” – and not just because she headed up a property management company that couldn’t manage its way out of a paper bag. There’s also the Special Investigating Unit probe that implicated her in procurement irregularities around R18m in dodgy Covid fogging contracts; the four winning companies were reportedly appointed at vastly inflated prices. Damningly, a separate report apparently found not one of them was experienced in cleaning and sanitation.

And that’s before you even get to the Usindiso Building fire. Botes has the blood of 76 people on her hands; she conceded to a commission of inquiry into the blaze that she had knowledge of the parlous conditions in the building – even as the property company sat on its hands. Indifference doesn’t even begin to cover it.

As for her intimate knowledge of the city’s entities, well, if you mean intimate experience of – and personal responsibility for – failure, then that’s right on the money. 

Oh, the irony …

Of course, Botes isn’t Morero’s only curious decision. There’s former ANC chief whip Sithembiso Zungu, appointed as MMC of group corporate and shared services earlier this month. 

In case you didn’t know, group corporate and shared services is “the nuts and bolts” of the city, in charge of streamlining the administration, providing support to the various departments, and running an expenditure budget that’s north of R700m. Very importantly, it’s also charged with “organising catering for mayoral functions”, the city says. Just so you know.

And, by the by, it runs an anti-fraud and corruption programme.

Which makes the appointment of Zungu deeply ironic. The man is alleged, on at least three occasions, to have been involved in dodgy “business forum” activity – that delightful South African euphemism for what is often tantamount to extortion. He denies the claims.

But he was reportedly sentenced to two months in prison in 2020 for contempt of court. This after he apparently ignored an interdict barring him and two associates from entering a housing development project – one that happened to have fallen prey to a “business forum” demanding “facilitation fees”. (He has denied this claim too.)

It all gives the lie to Morero’s pretensions at governing – laughably modest as they are. 

“We have only limited time,” Morero told New24 back in August last year. “But if we are able to put systems in place”, he said, his successor would be in a position to “implement changes”. 

If the systems Morero is putting in place now will determine the success of the next administration – well, be very afraid. At the very least, we can hope these miscreants are booted from office.

_{Top image: Joburg mayor Dada Morero. Picture: Gallo Images/Sharon Seretlo.}