Joyless in Joburg

There is no concrete plan to address the root cause of the collapse of the City of Joburg — the political instability that has resulted in a procession of 11 executive mayors since 2016. Instead there is confusion over the two urgent initiatives meant to tackle the escalating service delivery and financial crisis.

Worse, there is apparently no single politician able to provide the leadership the city needs to effect a rapid turnaround. It is immaterial whether mayor Dada Morero survives the motion of no confidence brought this week by DA caucus leader Belinda Kayser-Echeozonjoku. The DA attempt is viewed as a PR stunt rather than a genuine bid to shift the power dynamics in the council, since there is no visible plan for a successor through an alternative coalition arrangement. 

The city is governed by a coalition of the ANC, EFF, ActionSA, Patriotic Alliance, Al Jama-ah and other smaller parties. While Al Jama-ah said it was willing to vote with the DA in the no-confidence vote, in exchange for support for its own no-confidence vote against ActionSA speaker Nobuhle Mthembu, the DA would need more support from other parties for its motion to succeed.

At the time of going to print, ActionSA had not decided whether it would back the motion, chair Michael Beaumont told the FM. Still, the ANC was confident Morero would survive the vote.

Two separate initiatives have been launched — by the mayor and by the presidency — to address the service delivery crisis, but there is confusion about how they tie together, if at all. 

In March, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced an intervention for Joburg similar to his presidential working group in eThekwini, which worked closely with the executive mayor there to fix problems at the ailing metro. The eThekwini project has been yielding positive results.

The problem in Joburg, however, is that it is run by a mayoral committee whose members are appointed by the executive mayor. In eThekwini, the executive committee is appointed by the council.

Morero and his committee are said to function in a largely “feudal” way. Each member of the team is in essence looking after their own interests and those of their party.

“The mayoral committee comprises disparate political forces who are pulling in different directions,” one insider says.

“There’s a lot of political patronage and nepotism, and maybe even corruption. They are in fiefdoms and they all want to make sure that they’re getting a piece of the pie, including the ANC. Dada Morero is unable to provide the kind of leadership needed to steer the city. The difficulty is whether there is anyone else around who can.”

Insiders say Morero is “insulated” from the members of his mayoral committee, taking counsel from internal and external advisers instead of his own team.

This prompted the idea of a “bomb squad”, derived from the Springbok rugby team’s practice of bringing on fresh heavyweights to galvanise performance.

The Joburg bomb squad, which Morero announced in his state of the city address, is a group headed by ANC veteran Snuki Zikalala. The FM has spoken to two individuals who were invited to join it but declined because Morero did not provide a clear vision of their mission.

Ramaphosa’s team has been formed into eight working groups, to focus on burning issues including governance, finances, safety, human settlements and inner-city rejuvenation. There is little clarity from members of the 200-strong presidential team about how Morero’s bomb squad would fit in with this initiative.

ANC regional spokesperson Masilo Serekele, however, says the bomb squad can be likened to Elon Musk’s “Doge” (department of government efficiency), which Musk boasted had, among other things, fed the US Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper”. However, there has so far been no evidence of a ruthless pruning of dead wood in Joburg.

Serekele insists there is no overlap between the bomb squad’s work and that of Ramaphosa’s team. He says the presidential working group is limited to intergovernmental relations and unlocking bottlenecks between local, provincial and national government “because sometimes there’s duplication of work in all three spheres of government”.

The bomb squad is about the city’s functioning and how to improve it internally, he argues. “It deals with the efficiency of governance in Joburg. What seems to be working, what is not working, and how do we then turn it around? The bomb squad is meant to unblock bottlenecks in terms of efficiency.”

Serious problems in the city began when Parks Tau, now minister of trade, industry & competition, was mayor. The decision was taken to collapse all revenue into the city’s coffers, instead of ring-fencing it to maintain essential infrastructure for utilities. The infamous billing crisis emerged under Tau.

But it was under the 2016 DA-led administration headed by Herman Mashaba, who was heavily influenced by key coalition partner the EFF, that the city went dramatically off the rails. Sources in both the ANC and the DA attest to this. 

For instance, Serekele says it was during the Mashaba era that informal settlements began mushrooming, “due to the EFF influence. More than 40 new informal settlements arose. Between 2016 and 2018 alone, more than 20 emerged. This is what we are still battling with as the city.”

There is apparently no single politician able to provide the leadership the city needs to effect a rapid turnaround

Huge backlogs resulted after the Jozi at Work programme, in which local co-operatives were drawn in to repair potholes, do cleaning and other maintenance, was scrapped.

Mashaba’s signature “insourcing” policy was not well thought out, resulting in heavy costs for the city. “The insourcing of security guards, for example, was not properly budgeted for and it is directly related to the huge problem of vandalising of infrastructure that we still sit with today,” says Serekele.

Another problem that worsened over the years is the bloated administration. A skills audit under Mashaba, which was never publicly released, is understood to have shown that the majority of senior staffers do not have the required qualifications or experience for the posts they hold. This was revealed in media reports last week, citing internal documents. For instance, City Power paid a consultancy about R55m for work that highly paid internal executives should have been doing. 

The DA’s Mike Moriarty, who was chief of staff to DA former mayor Mpho Phalatse, tells the FM that about 50 senior executives in charge of all facets of service delivery report to a single manager, and only five of them “can do the job”. 

The DA has approached the courts over the years to address the ballooning number of staffers in the office of the mayor, which two years ago had about 130 people. Many were hangovers from previous administrations. While mayoral staff are usually linked to a particular mayor, this group was different — their contracts were made permanent, some on the eve of the last local election.

A major fly in the ointment cited by parties across the floor is acting city manager Helen Botes. The ANC says her title is not acting city manager but “acting COO”. It was felt she could be “utilised” in that role, pending investigation into alleged leasing scandals she was involved in at the Joburg Property Co (JPC).

Botes was also named in judge Sisi Khampepe’s report on the August 2023 Usindiso building fire in Albert Street in which 76 people died. Khampepe urged the JPC to take action against Botes for “total disregard” in managing the building, despite knowing the risks it had posed since 2019. 

Serekele says the process to appoint a permanent city manager is under way.

“Yes, there are allegations against Ms Botes, and one of the reasons we agreed that she must be shifted out of JPC is to allow the board to look at this objectively without interference, and then give us a comprehensive report.

“If we had left her in that space, she would have interfered with the investigation, and I think that was the thinking of Morero. But because she’s one of the senior administrators, who has been in the city for over 20 years, he felt she should be utilised in that space [acting COO].”

Serekele blames the state of the city on the need to cobble a coalition of several small parties together, but next year’s local government elections are likely to result in another hung council. Recent polling by the Brenthurst Foundation indicates that voters are likely to spread their choice again, with no outright winner.

That scenario might change if a strong leader emerged with the promise of getting things done and rooting out incompetence and corruption.

Step forward Helen Zille, the DA federal council chair who has been both mayor of Cape Town and premier of the Western Cape. If she is a candidate next year it would raise the stakes for all the contesting parties as her reputation could bolster DA support. Morero is being challenged by ANC comrade MMC Loyiso Masuku and it remains unclear whether ActionSA will field Mashaba for the post.

Meanwhile, long-suffering Joburg residents will be wondering if the city can hold out until the elections.