As Joburg races towards the local government election, all signs point to a coalition running the city after November 4. Either the DA or the ANC will be in the leading role, or they may choose to govern together.
So what are their plans to fix the city?
The ANC has grand ideas for the five-year term.
Loyiso Masuku, ANC chair in the Joburg region, says that just in the first year the party will prioritise filling critical posts and will fix a billing system that now gobbles revenue, restore infrastructure and “strengthen accountability” to slash water and electricity losses.
When it comes to people, Masuku says the best possible people should be put into leadership positions. She is, however, mindful of charges of political interference.
“The ANC is not above criticism; we have drawn hard lessons from the state capture commission,” she says. At the same time, she says ANC deployment policy has never meant deployment of the unqualified. “It means deployment of the best, most ethical and skilled to serve the people … party membership is not a crime [but] it is not a qualification.”
Inefficiency will face consequence management, she says.
These are promises that voters may feel they’ve heard from the ANC often. But Masuku is clear the party will make “merit-based appointments”, and its manifesto “bars councillors from directing officials to bypass procurement, financial, employment or administrative rules”.
The ANC says it will recruit capable entity boards within 90 days.
“Joburg is not a failed city,” Masuku says. “It is a city under severe pressure, and it can recover if financial discipline is turned into reliable services and reliable services into renewed confidence and investment.”
To swing things around, revenue issues and the billing system need to be fixed. The billing system, she says, is “the single biggest destroyer of public trust” in the city.
She says there’s a need to “modernise” the billing system — Joburg needs verified customer and property records; quality control of bills; actual meter readings; and a “customer interface, so [users] can monitor their own real-time consumption”.
But revenue is only half the job; fixing services and infrastructure is critical too.
Here, Masuku says it is important to ring-fence funds for services. “Entities will focus on repeat-failure areas, preventive maintenance, rapid response teams and critical repairs,” she says.
She says accountability is central — a funded turnaround delivery plan in which every priority “has a published baseline, accountable executive, budget, deadline, verifiable impact and risk avoidance intervention plans”.
Which sounds nice, but Joburg is in its present state precisely because the ANC avoided doing much of this for the past 30 years. Will voters buy its sudden urgency?
‘Good plans properly applied’
As for the DA, mayoral candidate Helen Zille is taking a leaf out of Cape Town’s book.
“If you appoint the right people to the right positions, have a zero-tolerance approach to corruption and have good plans properly applied, you can get far,” she tells the FM.
For Zille, getting the people right is critical: top management and city entity boards, in this case. At the same time, she acknowledges that the city entities aren’t of themselves a bad thing.
“They can work really, really well if you appoint outstanding people to them. [But the issue is] when they are used as another layer of political appointments and cadre deployment and extraction, because they manage big budgets,” she says.
So how is one to move the compromised and ineffectual out of the way to move the city forward? Zille won’t show her hand yet, but says: “There is a plan.”
Hiring people who are fit for purpose is one of the priorities Zille highlighted at her final rally before the election, at Nasrec on October 17. Also mentioned were repairing finances, cutting waste, fixing the billing system and funding essential services through ring-fencing funds.
The billing system is central. “It’s such a huge mess, but it’s a mess on purpose because mess facilitates corruption, and having it on spreadsheets facilitates corruption because no-one will see who put an extra nought on somebody’s bill or who wiped out somebody’s debt entirely,” she says.
Digitisation is the route to efficiency and accountability: “We have to digitise it properly and have it password protected so you can follow every single change in the system and track it back to a person.”
Infrastructure is also on her list: fix water, electricity and roads and transport. “That’s going to be an enormous challenge, just those two things [water and electricity] are very, very expensive,” she says.
Ring-fencing is crucial. “Money collected for water must fix water and money collected for electricity must fix electricity and not fund the ANC’s friends and family, blue lights and Johnny Walker blue,” she said at the launch of her campaign in March.
And, obviously, a no-tolerance approach to corruption. As she told the weekend rally, it’s time for Joburg to have its own “Madlanga moment”: public hearings and published findings into corruption.
“We will act on evidence from the auditor-general, whistleblowers, the Zondo commission and others,” she said. “We will rebuild the city’s anticorruption capacity, shield it from political interference and protect whistleblowers.”
Enforcing bylaws and restoring law and order is another of her priorities, as are clean and open public spaces, and resident-focused, responsive governance that ensures the ease of doing business and growing jobs.
None of which means this is a quick fix. “How long is a piece of string?” Zille responds when asked about timelines. “You know, Cape Town is like it is because the DA governed there for 20 years. It didn’t get like that in the first five years.”
