Joburg bets on ‘unglamorous' competence to halt decay

Share current article via Email Share current article via Facebook Share current article via Twitter Share current article via LinkedIn Johannesburg is dying ― water doesn't reach taps, power cuts out without warning, roads collapse into potholes so deep they have developed their own microclimates. Against that backdrop, Helen Zille's arrival as the DA's mayoral candidate feels less like an inspired choice than an exhausted one, a vote cast not out of enthusiasm but out of the desperate hope that someone ― anyone ― might fix it. Zille has run cities before ― Cape Town from 2006 and the Western Cape from 2009-19, and the audit record from those years isn't spin. It's just extremely boring, in the way that working infrastructure is. DA-run municipalities have consistently outperformed ANC-run ones, and even President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledges this. Zille's governing philosophy is unglamorous almost to a fault ― fix basics, streamline bureaucracy, stop theft, maintain infrastructure instead of cutting ribbons on things that stop working the moment the cameras leave. It has worked. In a city where residents can no longer take water pressure, electricity or a functioning traffic light for granted, 'unglamorous but functional' is not nothing. Right now it sounds less like a slogan and more like a miracle with a press release. But there's a serious caveat, and it's not a small one. Will Zille use the mayor's office to administer Johannesburg's apartheid geography more efficiently or to actually dismantle it? Her Cape Town record doesn't inspire much confidence. It turns out competence is not the same as courage. Cape Town has no approved inclusionary housing policy – no binding mechanism requiring new developments to include affordable units, nothing ensuring well-located land serves anyone beyond the market that already owns the view. When the provincial government eventually produced a framework, it had all the enforcement power of a strongly worded suggestion. No-one was obliged to adopt it, and shockingly, no affordable units got built in the inner city as a result. I'll vote for her because Johannesburg is sick, and right now competence isn't a luxury, it's the first treatment. Zille isn't the cure for everything ailing Johannesburg. But she may be what's needed to arrest the decay ― the unglamorous part before anyone gets to talk about healing. One DA councillor who tried to push a real inclusionary housing policy resigned in 2018, frustrated by what he called the party's unwillingness to confront spatial inequality. You have to admire the honesty of quitting rather than pretending the paperwork counted as progress. This year the Constitutional Court found that the City of Cape Town had failed to meet its obligations to provide social housing in the CBD and Sea Point – judicial confirmation, in case anyone needed it in writing, that spatial apartheid persists through present-day administrative choices. Importantly, Johannesburg already has an inclusionary housing policy on the books ― a rare gift from a city not known for having its paperwork in order. Will Zille strengthen enforcement, or let it wither on the vine the way its Cape Town counterpart did? That said, I'll vote for Zille. Not because I've started a fan club or because administrative competence is the same thing as social justice. Not because her record on housing and spatial transformation should escape scrutiny. Not because I don't care about Gaza, and not because I think she should continue with outrageous gaffes in the Twittersphere. I'll vote for her because Johannesburg is sick, and right now competence isn't a luxury, it's the first treatment. Zille isn't the cure for everything ailing Johannesburg. But she may be what's needed to arrest the decay ― the unglamorous part before anyone gets to talk about healing. So vote for her ― reluctantly, critically. Support the competence. Demand the clean government. Then hold her, loudly and relentlessly, to change the Cape town template. Because getting Johannesburg functioning again is necessary but is not, by itself, justice. In a city where race and class remain the primary divides, that distinction isn't academic ― fixing the potholes is not the same as fixing the map. • Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.