Читать книгу The Accidental Mayor - Michael Beaumont - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe true state of Johannesburg
On Tuesday 23 August 2016, Herman Mashaba walked into the Johannesburg Metro Centre for the first time as the executive mayor of Johannesburg. As he passed through the main entrance, he realised he had no idea where he was going and stopped to ask a security guard if he knew where the mayor’s office was.
He still laughs about the look on that security guard’s face, suspecting that it was the first time a mayor of the city had ever spoken to him.
Mashaba called the city manager, Dr Trevor Fowler, who came to meet him and get him settled into his office. It was a completely alien space, filled with awards and memorabilia of achievements entirely irrelevant to the needs of the residents of Johannesburg. A stark reminder of the perils of being out of touch with your electorate.
In Mashaba’s office were all the daily newspapers, most of which carried the ANC’s response to his election, which was to confidently predict the demise of the multiparty government within the first three months. They omitted to say, as became apparent to us later, that they would actively seek to cause the demise of the government every day of its existence.
Days later the funeral was held for the ANC councillor who had passed away during the long inaugural council meeting in which Mashaba was elected mayor. At the funeral, the former mayor and now councillor and leader of the opposition, Parks Tau, claimed that Mashaba believed all women who worked for the city were prostitutes who had slept their way to their positions. We deduced that this was a response to a speech Mashaba had given on the campaign trail about nepotism in government. He had said that people in government must be hired because of their skills and experience and not because they were someone’s girlfriend. This had clearly touched a nerve.
When Mashaba was still campaigning to become Johannesburg’s mayor, we believed we had an idea of how big the city’s problems were. After all, the election campaign of an opposition party is characterised by an analysis and description of the failures of the incumbent government and how we would do it differently. But in fact we had no idea what state the city was actually in.
Our predecessors had spent more than R300 million on self-promoting marketing in 2016 alone. And the residents had footed the bill. Billboards were plastered all over Johannesburg with the tagline ‘A World Class African City’. It was impossible to turn on the radio without hearing one of the city’s many adverts highlighting what the ANC had accomplished in Johannesburg. If you changed the station in annoyance, you would hear another advert playing on a different station. Similarly, the odds of opening a newspaper without seeing a lavish full-page advertorial touting the achievements of the incumbents were minimal. Mashaba raised the question of whether the previous government’s darling status with the media arose from this lucrative advertising revenue.
Even back then, as the DA’s mayoral candidate, Mashaba had laid an official complaint with the IEC about the abuse of public funds on party political self-promotion. Unfortunately, his complaint was dismissed.
Much effort seemingly went into constructing this idea that the City of Johannesburg was one of the better-run municipalities. It was only later, once Mashaba was mayor, that he discovered ‘Operation Final Push’, a programme approved by the previous administration authorising extensive marketing in the run-up to the local government elections. The justification for this was stated as: ‘The democratic requirement for government to report back on its achievements over the term of office.’
Mashaba regarded this as one of the greatest and most appalling abuses of public money for political purposes. When you consider the level of attention afforded to former president Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla homestead scandal, which involved less money, it is amazing that this hardly raised an eyebrow in the media.
With all the trumpeting of its successes, one would have expected the city to be in a workable state when Mashaba assumed office. But the reality was very different.
From 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 found them lying in dusty corners under brochures for luxury vehicles. There was no agenda to combat crime, improve service reliability, increase the ease of doing business or clean the city – things that any first-year economics student will tell you are the preconditions for economic growth. Instead, these items had been neglected and had developed into multibillion-rand backlogs that would feature prominently in our nightmares to come.
The Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) had been reduced to an ineffective, under-resourced and overstretched ‘jump out of the bushes’ speed-camera operation. By-law enforcement was non-existent and there were no specialised units achieving intelligent policing. Crime levels in the city had reached epic proportions, with violent crime and robberies having risen to record highs. Studies commissioned by the city, which were found on our arrival, clearly showed how crime had become a major driver of disinvestment.
The revenue department was in disarray and very few people had worked in the city long enough to remember it ever being otherwise. There were enormous revenue losses in the system due to incompetence, a crumbling IT infrastructure, poor management of the value chain and corruption. Some of the highest-value properties in the city, including one upmarket shopping centre in a prime location, were valued at zero rands in the property valuation roll. Houses of the politically connected elite were horrendously undervalued, and those who were willing to pay bribes had managed to have enormous historical debt erased with a click of a mouse. Billions of rands were being lost through inefficiencies in the system that would simply wipe accounts, leaving properties to consume services without ever being billed.
Despite our predecessors’ claims to have stabilised the city’s finances, improving its credit ratings, nothing could have been further from the truth. They cut expenditure across the city in order to continuously rebase the budget downwards to meet the falling revenue collection rates. This simply deferred the ever-growing problem of infrastructure decay and social backlogs. Time and again they failed to take the difficult decision to cut non-priorities. Borrowing ballooned to the ceiling of 45 per cent of revenue prescribed by National Treasury, with the city in debt to the tune of R18 billion.
Not unlike the banks that sparked the global financial crisis by lending money they essentially did not have, the city had secured borrowings against unrealistic revenue projections which, year after year, simply did not materialise. To make matters worse, national government’s promises to fork out more money were not honoured following the fiscal crunch in National Treasury. This created a fiscal bubble in the budget with debt service costs exceeding R2 billion a year and loans becoming due.
The administration of the city was no better than the state of our finances. Any good political leader knows that building a strong, capable administration is the most important deliverable. When you achieve this, you have professional civil servants capable of serving the agenda of whichever political party receives a mandate from the people.
We inherited an administration with 33000 people, all of whom had been appointed by previous governments. While it was certainly not true of all city employees, it was immediately clear that a vast majority of appointments had been made on the basis of loyalty to the ANC rather than ability to serve the residents.
Added to this was the organised labour environment. Upon entering office we were faced with two factions within the biggest union in Johannesburg, the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU). We would meet with the union’s leaders, only to be told by another group claiming to be the real leadership that the group we had met with was an illegitimate faction. With SAMWU’s ability to cripple the city’s capacity to deliver frontline services, this was an enormous risk.
Then we get to intergovernmental relations with provincial and national government. In the past, and for obvious reasons, this had been a cosy, familial relationship. As an example, national government imposed e-tolls, a ridiculous and most costly model of tolling the highways, and the city did not object on behalf of its residents because they were all part of the same party. Not any more.
It was brought to Mashaba’s attention that the ANC had racked up millions in unpaid bills for services rendered by the JMPD during their various functions, marches and rallies over the years. Naturally, our predecessors had not pursued these costs. Of course, Mashaba adopted a different approach. Legal papers were drawn up for the ANC headquarters at Luthuli House to be attached to recoup these monies. This was amusingly illustrated in a cartoon by Alistair Findlay, which showed Mashaba in a removal truck towing away the ANC headquarters, ‘Lootuli House’.
Similarly, when Mashaba discovered that the Gauteng provincial government owed the City of Johannesburg over R800 million in unpaid rates and service charges, he was livid. Unlike our residents, who were mercilessly disconnected by an aggressive credit control policy, the buddy-buddy relationship with provincial government had allowed this bill to become our largest outstanding account. Three days before the much-vaunted State of the Province Address, Mashaba drew up a letter to Gauteng premier David Makhura, explaining that they had three days to pay up or their electricity would be cut. Under Mashaba, the honeymoon of intergovernmental relations that worked for politicians and against residents was over.
Clearly, the city that Mashaba inherited was not the ‘World Class African City’ that our predecessors had said it was. It was a disaster, one that we had to deal with.
Given the nature and magnitude of the task ahead, it required monumental strength not to lose hope in the idea that the city could be fixed. Mashaba faced the challenges head on, with a dogged perseverance borne of an unspoken sentiment that it just had to be done.
‘You want easy? What’s easy in life?’ he would respond to anyone overheard despairing.
One thing was certain: complaining about it wasn’t going to improve the city, and Mashaba wasn’t much of a complainer. He knew the city and its residents needed leadership, not finger-pointing. And coming from his particular entrepreneurial background, saying the odds were just too steep or the work too difficult was never an option. He was not the type to give up, especially now that people depended on him.
Our most immediate challenge was that this disastrous state lay beneath a veneer of success, cultivated with hundreds of millions of rands’ worth of marketing, and very few people knew the truth. We had to crack this idea of the ‘World Class African City’. We had to manage expectations. We could not achieve the massive turnaround of Johannesburg if we did not take our residents into our confidence. People had to know the extent to which their city had deteriorated if they were to see the road we had to travel together to fix it.
It wasn’t as if people didn’t know the city had challenges; they knew. They lived in the informal settlements, drove through the potholes, experienced the power outages and turned on the taps to find no water coming out. Now, with the multiparty government installed, people believed this was all going to change, and overnight.
We immediately embarked on a massive communications drive to illustrate the true state of the city. We called a press conference in which we laid bare the backlogs in service delivery and critical infrastructure for journalists to report. The following day the front pages were loaded with the gory facts about Johannesburg.
You can imagine the bewilderment of politicians when Mashaba openly described the disastrous state of the city he led. Political convention required him to talk up the city and gloss over the issues, no matter how apparent.
In his State of the City Address in May 2017, Mashaba declared:
I am not going to spend my time talking about how our city has ended up in its current state and who is to blame for it.
The voters of our city have already done that.
As the executive mayor of this city, I do not get to pick and choose my responsibilities.
I have inherited a city, and mine is to accept the full and unconditional responsibility to work on making our city a better place for all of its residents.
At each successive State of the City Address he delivered, Mashaba addressed the service delivery and infrastructural backlogs to the groans of the ANC benches. At every public speaking engagement he described the state of the city he had inherited. It did not matter whether he was at a church service, a business breakfast or an old-age home, people had to know how they had been lied to. But he also made sure that everyone understood that we had both the plans and the resolve to address this poor inheritance.
It got to the point where it wasn’t just the ANC benches who groaned in agony when Mashaba began speaking of these backlogs. But he didn’t mind. He knew from his marketing background that it was only when people started to complain about your stubborn repetition that you knew your message was sinking in.
