The hard-pressed residents of Joburg may be forgiven for thinking that their home, if it were a movie, would be Apocalypse Now.
The unstable coalitions that have misgoverned the city are a repeating cameo for the mad Colonel Kurtz, the rogue special forces officer making war on the people around his jungle citadel.
And there, muttering slowly against the current, comes a Patrol Boat, River (PBR), with its anxious crew of misfits, including the city’s next mayor.
It is only a metaphor because, if nothing else, the former mining camp has no rivers deep or wide enough to float a PBR. Its water is pumped uphill and through creaking pipes, using electricity it often doesn’t have, from 100km away. That fact alone makes Joburg as fragile as the coalitions that have failed to govern it.
Back in 1991, the biggest controversy in town was the Civic Spine development, a project that sought to revamp the area between the Rissik Street post office and the library. A lot of people, shopkeepers mostly, hated it. Its budget was R10.5m, mere petrol bucks compared with the R23bn the city’s administrations have frittered away since 2010. But still.
At the centre of it was Eddy Magid, himself a former mayor, who said if the project wasn’t finished on time, he would ride out of Joburg on his horse (again, metaphors).
The Civic Spine, whose supporters believed would give the already faltering CBD some backbone, stands today as a symbol of what critics would now call unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
One wonders what advice Magid, who died in May at 97, would have for the crew of the PBR. Perhaps it would be the immortal line offered by panicked, mud-spattered Chef, the crewman who only just escapes being eaten by a huge tiger after going ashore to get mangoes: “I gotta remember,” he screams, slithering around on the deck, “never get outta the boat.”
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