On March 11 2025, Tshwane executive mayor Nasiphi Moya took to X to say she will “deal decisively with corruption” in the city.
“We have many people in this country who live in poverty not because there wasn’t money to help improve their lives, but because the money went to fund mansions and Gucci bags,” she wrote.
The mayor seems to be good at PR. Her X feed is replete with clips of raids on illegal spaza shops, cutting off the juice to defaulting, electricity-stealing supermarkets, impounding illegally parked cars and trucking away wrecked taxis in Marabastad, because they are “crime generators” where street dealers hide their drugs.
There have been a lot of these drives in the six months since she became mayor. One news report claims the Tshwane Ya Tima campaign, which pursues defaulting households and businesses, has recovered R13m — a mere drop in the ocean of the country’s financial malfeasance, but still, every penny counts.
Meanwhile, Hammanskraal’s taps are flowing, most of the time, after two years of residents getting their water from tanker trucks, parks have been cleaned up and the dysfunctional Rooiwal wastewater works may yet be repaired.
So far so good. Except for this: marking the state of the city address with a cavalcade of motorbikes, fire trucks and police on horses is the kind of thing that those whose water isn’t flowing so nicely from their taps will remember the most.
The citizens of the Lucky Country have become used to blue-light convoys strutting through the streets. But they’re not inured to them, and the ballot box is always just one election away.
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