People reading here can mainly afford #Gautrain and #MyCiti tickets. We can afford to live in gated communities whose roads, power, water and security are maintained by HOAs. Many of us live a weird point-to-point existence - shops, houses, schools, banks, holiday destination, even churches - all separated out and provided specially for we who can afford them.

But have you been to #Hillbrow?

I've been through Hillbrow to help my migrant friends get transport in and out of #SouthAfrica. It's a base for intercontinental taxis. Hillbrow has been abandoned by the city 'fathers'. Rubbish hasn't been collected for years, the roads are potholes filled with a soup of sewage. The people of Hillbrow live jammed twenty-to-a-room in the remains of early 20th Century flats. Many buildings don't have power or water, and are administered by ganglords. The police circle the streets looking for bribes and sexual favours. Most people don't have formal work, but everyone is selling something.

This is the cost of how we live in our fortress. It's a cost for everyone else: living outside. And it results in a specialised kind of police state in which #ZamaZamas are starved underground by the cops, who think that this is what their paymasters actually want them to do.

That's US, people. WE are the ones who pay for our security from the dispossessed. WE are the ones who 'pay our taxes' so that the #SAPS will keep the hoipolloi under control.

And I acknowledge that as a wealthy #white South African, I shouldn't be writing this. But then, who the hell will?

「But now #Johannesburg is on the cusp of firing hapless #KabeloGwamanda as mayor as the #ANC at national level clicks how it lost the election primarily in the cities. #Gwamanda is like a character from Can Themba’s story The Suit – an empty caricature of a mayor. He is the fifth mayor since the election in 2021, when no single party won.

Elected as part of a tortured compromise to create a coalition between the ANC and the #EFF, Gwamanda is from #AlJamaAh, which has only three seats in the council.

He owes loyalty and fealty to his political bosses, but he needs to show no accountability to the people because they did not appoint him. In a callous display of this, he called citizens “stooges” in July when protests grew against the impact of sky-high electricity tariffs and charges.

According to my source, he will be out in a week, and the city will have its sixth mayor since the local government election in 2021.

As the place where gold was discovered and a metropolis shot up without a supporting river or body of water, Johannesburg is an exciting and storied city.
Rebuilding #Joburg

The mayoral musical chairs is a political joke, but it’s not funny. Johannesburg is systemic for South Africa; it’s too big to fail. Too many people live here. Too much of the economy is concentrated here. Too much of our history is contained here.

It is going to take much more than a change of mayor to fix it. What does that fix look like? Fortunately, we know about it because of the work of #Jozi My Jozi, the civil society and corporate programme to bring it back from the brink, and the #JohannesburgCrisisAlliance.

Jozi My Jozi’s team has relit the Nelson Mandela Bridge and revamped the arterial on- and off-ramps into the city. In a major programme, its volunteers cleaned #Hillbrow on Mandela Day. Ahead of the All Blacks game at Ellis Park at the end of August, a plan is under way to revamp and uplift the eastern inner-city area from Ponte to Ellis Park and further down.

The Crisis Alliance has tabulated and project-managed exactly what a fix of Joburg will require and how it should happen. The city needs to be put under national administration, like Durban’s eThekwini council. It is the only way to bring back the two cities from the urbacide (killing of a city) visited upon them by local #StateCapture.

In Joburg, this will entail a legal shake-out of the administration and entities such as #CityPower, #JohannesburgWater, the #JohannesburgRoadsAgency and #Pikitup, through which the city is ostensibly managed. Each one of them is a basket case, rendered so by decades of cadre deployment and extractive politics.」

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-08-11-joburg-is-too-big-to-fail-its-time-to-give-it-back-to-its-people/

「 #BLSA calls for engagement to rescue City of #Johannesburg

[…]

“The escalation of crisis incidents, such as the recent deadly fire in #Hillbrow, the gas explosion in the central business district and an increase in property hijackings and criminal syndicates, are warnings that urgent action is required to prevent the total collapse of the city. Even anarchy is fast becoming a real concern,” posits CEO Busisiwe #Mavuso. 」

https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/blsa-calls-for-engagement-to-rescue-city-of-johannesburg-2023-11-06

#SouthAfrica