The Tragedy of the collapse of South Africa’s biggest city: Johannesburg
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Successive African National Congress administrations have driven the country deep into a mire of structural collapse and institutional dysfunction. One should not underestimate how laborious a process it will be to extract it.
South Africa has since 1994 been in slow but steady decline, aside from a sunny interlude of brisk economic growth under President Thabo Mbeki. It is not seriously contested, even by ANC supporters, that by virtually every important political, social and economic statistical measure we have gone backwards.
As Dr Jakkie Cilliers, Africa analyst and chair of the Institute for Strategic Studies, pointed out in a BizNews interview this week, it is going to be enormously challenging to make up the lost ground. Our GDP per capita, the primary measure of a country’s economic heartbeat, peaked in 2013. In a “business as usual” scenario, it will take until 2036 to get back to this level, according to the ISS’s latest forecasting model. In the “best case” scenario, if the Government of National Unity can survive, this can possibly be brought forward to 2030.
But such statistics are just one window into the rickety state of the nation. A series of snapshots, visually capturing change over time, can sometimes be a better, more vivid, way to comprehend the scale of the loss than the cold numbers.
This might explain why a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, has over the past few weeks captured public attention. The Jozi vs Jozi (@jozivsjozi) account, using the Street View function of Google Maps, each day juxtaposes then and now pictures of the same slice of Johannesburg roadside real estate.
The account exists, the blurb says, to raise awareness around “the unprecedented but avoidable decline” of the city. It is “a labour of love for a city that means a lot to many”. In the few weeks that Jozi vs Jozi has existed, it has acquired 34,000 followers and routinely draws hundreds of thousands of views to a tweet.
TimesLIVE, which tracked down the account holder, who has chosen to remain anonymous, reports that he was motivated by disappointment at how the country’s economically most important city had “devolved” in terms of the provision of basic services and crumbling infrastructure.
When Johannesburg was at its peak in the democratic era, youngsters and overseas tourists would walk through the streets of Braamfontein or cross the Nelson Mandela Bridge to catch taxis “with no concerns for their safety”. This was no longer possible. However, people had become “desensitised” to the city’s dysfunction. “Johannesburg no longer has hope,” he said.
In his tweets, the “then” pictures, mostly taken between 2010 and 2013, and the “now” pictures, dating back a year or two, have geotags that identify the exact spot where they were taken. Occasionally there are wry captions commenting on the contrast between the two scenes depicted but these are rare and understated. Words are superfluous given the dispassionately merciless eye of the Google camera.
It’s not a pretty picture. These are not the purple-clad jacaranda-lined streets, the lovely homes and fine public buildings of the tourist brochures, though these in many places still exist.
On the other hand, the images are not selectively culled from the shantytowns and slums that every big city in the world has. These photographs are simply a straightforward record of the relentless erosion that Johannesburg, a sometimes brash but once perfectly functional city, has undergone in barely a decade. Of course, had Google been around in 1994 to record every inch of road at the dawn of the democratic era, the contrast would be even more striking.
What an optimist or a tour operator might describe as “colourful and bursting with life”, the Google cameras record as impoverishment, desperation, and despair. Magnificent public parks now colonised by the homeless, the helpless and the hopeless. Furtive figures gathered in knots on corners and lurking among what scant vegetation remains.
In some frames, Joburg looks like a war zone. Shelled buildings and cratered streets, war-weary refugees sheltering under improvised bivouacs thrown up in the lee of scarred and crumbling edifices. Rubbish is heaped on corners. Water — or sewage? — seeps down the street. Massive potholes, broken gutters, upended kerbstones and random boulders — from where? — are impromptu road hazards that would impede a tank.
Reality is more mundane. Jozi is not at war, except perhaps with itself. The wounds are self-inflicted, the result of decades of civic neglect, municipal corruption and vicious infighting over the division of spoils between politicians.
The timelines tell the story. ANC’s Amos Masondo led the metro for more than a decade, between 2000 and 2011. He was succeeded by another ANC mayor, Parks Tau, who lasted five years until 2016. ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba, then a Democratic Alliance member, could only manage three years before he was out.
Depending on how you count, since one mayor made a brief repeat appearance, there have been nine mayors since 2019, each more useless than the previous. Over a two-year stretch, three sequentially died in office — although their contributions to the running of the city were so negligible that one should be forgiven for not having noticed.
Last month, Kabelo Gwamanda, representing the minuscule Al Jama-a party — drawing barely half a percent of the votes cast in the previous municipal election — was the most recent mayor shown the exit. He has since been arrested for allegedly swindling city residents in a funeral insurance scam.
The countrywide response to the Jozi vs Jozi tweets is a measure of the continued importance of Egoli, the once-fabled city of gold. Despite decades of semigration to Cape Town, Johannesburg remains the financial and industrial hub, contributing 16-20% of South Africa’s GDP, about the same as Cape Town (10-12%) and Durban (8-10%) combined.
But the blows continue to come thick and fast. On Wednesday the Johannesburg Roads Agency admitted that 702 of the city’s 902 bridges are “in danger of structural failure and require substantial renewal or upgrading”. A dozen of them, based on visual inspections, are in “imminent danger of collapse”, which is suspiciously fewer than the 25% that Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse assesses as “unsafe to cross”.
Johannesburg’s woes, which are substantially replicated in every South African city, are a subset of Gauteng’s woes. This week, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, which conducts an authoritative biannual survey across 33 indicators, released its latest Quality of Life report. Its findings are unambiguous. The province, which has a quarter of South Africa’s population and contributes more than a third of its GDP, is in continued decline and the index is at its lowest point since it was first calculated 15 years ago.
More than half (57%) of those surveyed believe South Africa is a failed state. Three-quarters (76% say that government officials do not put people first. More than 80% feel unsafe walking in their suburb at night.
Some politicians, however, still struggle to get the message. Mashaba was at pains to exclude the DA, with its generally more efficient and honest governance record, from the Joburg mayorship deal he recently reached with the ANC. He says that he is sanguine about the city’s prospects.
“Johannesburg is not as bad as Germany after the Second World War, which was nearly flattened. If the Germans can do it and the Rwandans can do it after their genocide, why not Joburg?”
Jozi’s anonymous tweeter has a different view. “Johannesburg,” he told TimesLIVE, “is one of the greatest urban tragedies that I have seen.”
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