Requests for the mayor’s time would come in at a rate of around 20 per hour. I soon realised how important it was to protect Mashaba’s time, knowing that to address Johannesburg’s challenges, time would be our most precious commodity. Honouring even a fraction of these requests would translate into very little getting done. I quickly learnt the subtle art of gatekeeping, the ability to lock out the non-essential and ensure that every minute was spent optimally on the agenda. This made me supremely unpopular with just about everyone.
It was up to me to ensure that there was never a loss of focus on the mayor’s agenda. In a city of the size and complexity of Johannesburg, it is easy to be sidetracked by peripheral matters. Before you know it, your critical people are mired in meetings and work that does not further your priorities. A chief of staff must bring everyone back on point when necessary.
My biggest task by far would be to ensure that the strategic direction set by the multiparty government found expression in the plans and practices of a hostile administration. With 33000 employees appointed by the previous government, notorious for cadre deployment, we could safely assume that we wouldn’t get much help. In the best-case scenario we would be dealing with people who didn’t understand our agenda and direction. In the worst-case scenario there would be those actively seeking to undermine and sabotage us at every turn.
We were going to need something of an A-team to handle this task. Some politicians appoint weak people around them to flatter their egos, but this wasn’t Mashaba’s nature. We needed the best.
I brought in André Coetzee, a talented policy and research expert with communications experience, to be our director of policy and planning. He had run Solly Msimanga’s mayoral campaign in Tshwane and clearly had the intelligence to match his toughness. Simangaliso Shongwe, a stakeholder manager from Eskom’s difficult Kusile power station project, would handle our relationships with communities, labour and stakeholders.
Tony Taverna-Turisan had worked as a lawyer in the private sector and served in our communications operation in Parliament. He had replaced Willie Venter as Mashaba’s mayoral campaign manager on the eve of the election and the two had hit it off immediately. Tony was brought in as communications director the day before I arrived, and did a great job in those early months. In 2018, when we were battling to find a suitable director of legal services, Tony made the move and took up the essential mantle of legal advisor to the mayor. At that point, communications veteran Luyanda Mfeka came on as our new director of communications.
Lufuno Mashau was in the city’s governance department when we arrived. A brilliant financial mind with experience in the private sector, he was quickly roped in as financial advisor to discern the reality of the city’s financial position. Thabo Maisela, a former executive director of housing in the city with a ton of experience, assumed the role of inner city advisor. Saarah Salie, a highly skilled expert in performance management who had plied her trade in local government in the United Kingdom, became our director of monitoring and evaluation.
Each one left permanent or stable employment to take up fixed-term contracts in perhaps the most uncertain work environment around. If this government sank, they would sink with it. To their credit, they did not let this stand in their way. They were a dedicated team focused on making the most of this arrangement. There is something about people who come from an opposition background. They are hungry to achieve real change, they take nothing for granted and they have usually achieved much with very few resources – the exact qualities we needed.
With a good team and with my own experience in politics, I thought I was prepared for the mammoth task ahead. I mean, how much worse could it be than running provincial campaigns for a decade? To this day, I still laugh at my naivety.
It was the same with the job of mayor. Late one Friday evening, while discussing his diary for the following week, Mashaba turned to me and said: ‘Michael, you know, I built a business empire from nothing out of the boot of my car. This job makes that seem like a holiday.’
The 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