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