Collin Matjila, chairman of the executive committee of the Greater Johannesburg TMC, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
Who? This is the man who, for the past year, has controlled a budget of R6-billion, bigger than that of four provinces and over half the size of Gauteng’s. This is the man who has had 35 000 people working for him; who has been responsible for a polity of around two million people. The single most telling fact about Collin Matjila, city boss of Johannesburg, is that the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for him last Wednesday have never even heard of him.
The politics of big cities are as notoriously dirty as their grimy streets, and Johannesburg is no exception. Matjila has been our Koch, our Daley, our Kollek, our Chirac. He came to power in a blood-stained council chamber — his henchmen cut deals that stabbed the frontrunner, civic leader Cas Coovadia, in the back — and there will be blood once more, next week, when the the African National Congress’ provincial executive decides whether Matjila should keep the job or whether it should go to his challenger, Kenny Fihla.
You’ll know, if you’ve watched your movies, that cities are places of apocalyptic decay run by cabals of cigar- smoking men in shirtsleeves and thick, grubby, yellow suspenders, billowing plumes of acrid smoke above conference tables stacked with papers and half-finished cups of coffee. It’s Friday evening, 7pm, and a group of men sit around just such a table on the second floor of Metropolitan Centre in Braamfontein. Okay, so they’re smoking Special Milds, but the effect is the same: a small, tight, introspective circle of men around Matjila has been running Johannesburg.
One of Matjila’s first actions was to put a gag on all Jo’burg officials, keeping them from speaking to the media: he would be the sole spokesman. The result: silence. In the week before the election, his diary was all but empty. But for a few engagements, he was not on the campaign trail. Strange politicians, these: they don’t seem to want you to know who they are.
The paper-laden table where the gang gathers is in the office of Ivor Isaacs, who has attained notoriety in Johannesburg as the ANC’s prime wheeler-dealer. An ex- lawyer who lived on a kibbutz in Israel for five years and worked in the rag trade before entering politics, he is reviled by comrades and opponents alike. He sits at Matjila’s right in the council chamber; some call him “Rasputin”; others the “eminence grise”. He is a bamboozler; his plans for saving Johannesburg have included building a waterfront in Alexandra and knocking down the CBD to rebuild it from scratch.
Isaacs’ darting eyes are everywhere, but his conference table is his kingdom. Sitting around it tonight, like every night, with him and Matjila, are Norman Prince and Eugene Robson. The former is a wise-cracking ex- shacklord from Soweto, who led land invasions before becoming the council’s head of town planning; the latter is a quiet and affable accountant from Eldorado Park who is, by all accounts, the brains of the gang.
Perhaps Matjila is ruing his association with them: so unpopular are Isaacs and Prince that they didn’t make it high enough on Johannesburg’s Transitional Metropolitan Council (TMC) list, and will have to fight for positions in the chamber from the metropolitan substructures (MSSs) to which they were elected. Matjila’s own base is in Soweto, but he has lost this territory to Kenny Fihla, who is being sponsored by township pols who feel that Matjila’s administration — concerned primarily with the consolidation of power at a metropolitan level — has rendered the MSSs impotent and meaningless.
Fihla, third on the Metro list (figurehead mayor Isaac Mogase is first, and Matjila second), was recently elected secretary-general of the ANC’s Johannesburg sub-region. If he wins the battle, it will be a brutal indictment of Matjila; if he loses, it will be testimony to the current chair’s quiet and enigmatic political nous. Matjila, unlike his kitchen-cabinet, does not come from nowhere. A lawyer, he built himself up through branch politics, and was secretary of the Soweto ANC before being elected onto the Gauteng provincial executive, where he holds the local governnment portfolio.
His deputy, on the executive, is Gauteng MEC for local government Dan Mofokeng, and therein lies the rub. Mofokeng — believed to be one of Fihla’s sponsors — must be one of the wiliest political operators around, and he has not hidden his antipathy towards Matjila. In fact, a few weeks ago, Mofokeng issued a proclamation establishing Johannesburg’s four MSSs as the primary organs of local government and giving them the right to collect their own taxes and do their own planning. Observers say the province fears a Metro that is too powerful and would rather deal with four smaller entities.
And so The Battle of Johannesburg is one of consolidation versus devolution: who shall rule, the Metro or the MSSs? Matjila can be forgiven for seeing Mofokeng’s intervention as a direct slap in the face: he is an unashamed advocate of the mega-city. In an unusual rush of fervour (his style is generally ponderous and dispassionate), he told me that a mega- city “is what this country needs. Our cities have not been able to develop beyond the myopic view of the old Afrikaner dorpies. Cities must be free to exploit potential. If that means going the route of a mega- city, why not?”
He believes there is a role for boroughs (the fact that we call them MSSs only highlights the obfuscatory and opaque nature of current local government) within such a system. The answer, of course, is a balance between the two: by keeping power so closely to its chest, however, Matjila’s administration has sparked a counter-reaction that is far too severe. One very influential player in the Gauteng government notes: “If Collin was a more mature politician, he might have sold his vision of a mega-city, perhaps by co-opting the MSSs by giving them token power, or by showing that he has the will and the skill to drive things from a metro level. He achieved neither. He missed a great opportunity, and is now in danger of losing his job.”
Supporters and detractors alike note his intelligence, and his very quick grasp of the issues. But the Democratic Party’s Ian Davidson, his predecessor, saw Matjila’s problem as a “lack of confidence, and a lack of authority even within the ANC caucus”. This led him to submit even the most mundane proposals to unnecessary interrogation: everything was referred to committees and consultants. When Ivor Isaacs boasts that “we dealt with over 3 000 pages of agenda a week”, he misses the point, say his opponents: he generated that volume, unneccessarily, himself.
Perhaps the sharpest thorn in Matjila’s side is Democratic Party councillor Frances Kendall, who sued the council for the manner in which its executive committee was appointed. A supreme court judge recently ruled in her favour: Matjila and his gang had, the judgment said, acted not only unlawfully, but with “a high degree of obduracy and irresponsibility”, because they had abused public funds in going to court rather than settling with Kendall.
Kendall maintains that “the TMC has been an appalling failure, because they’ve hung onto all the power and you can’t run a huge city from one bureaucracy. No wonder services have declined!” Of course, Kendall is fighting an election campaign. A city reporter on a Johannesburg newspaper has a different opinion: her newspaper kept on getting complaints from readers about service decline, and so she looked high and low for the evidence, but couldn’t find it. “The service decline story is a perception, not a reality,” she says, the fever of white suburban paranoia.
Matjila says he is pleased with his performance: most important was his R92-million strategic project initiative which has, he says, provided basic services to townships, water to 20 000 who didn’t have it, and set up portacabin clinics in several squatter camps. He also squashes the DP’s claim that the Masakhane campaign isn’t working with the statistic that, in Soweto, ratepaying has increased from eight percent to 30 percent since March.
He has a nifty phrase — “20/20 vision” — to describe how he would like to see the city in the year 2020: it will be “a living city rather than a working city, a 24-hour city, with adequate infrastructure”. There are two panaceas: densification and job creation. When I asked him how his administration planned to deal with the problem of rapid urbanisation, though, he faltered. The only answer he could give was that there should be what amounts to a new dompas system: no work for non- residents.
Later, when we met again, he thanked me for bringing an important issue to his attention. I gasped: ever since Jim came to Jo’burg and Verwoerd sent him home again, this has been South Africa’s primary urban issue. Is there any other issue, in this city, besides rapid urbanisation?
Perhaps it’s too much to expect vision from a man who has hit the decaying streets of Johannesburg running; who, with only one-third of the votes in the TMC, had to run an institution the size of a small country. There’s an enigma to Matjila that’s hard to read: he is a young man (35) with a gravitas that makes his supporters call him “the young Madiba”. When he speaks people listen, even though his rhetoric is bland and colourless and he keeps populist exhortations to a minimum. He seems depressed, beleaguered.
Davidson says that he found it “amazing that Matjila avoided contact with me altogether. It was as if he was scared of me. When I was chair, I was in and out of my predecessor’s office all the time, getting consensus going. But Matjila didn’t seem to be interested.”
Davidson’s comment points as much to Matjila’s personality as to the ethos of mistrust at Metro Centre, an ethos that Matjila could not override with Madibaesque gesture. I went with him, before last Wednesday’s election, to an ANC campaign meeting in the north. White folk, a minority speckling the ranks of domestic service, whinged about crime and postal services and rates. Then a domestic worker stood up: in troubled English, he told how he lived his entire life in the ward, but owned nothing there. She was a stranger in her world.
Matjila himself has moved from his native Soweto, via Ennerdale, to a rented property in Parkhurst: he has juggled geographical identities and has found himself caught, at the Metro Centre in Braamfontein, between a grasping black south and a grumpy white north. The legacy of apartheid does make this city — like all newly integrated South African cities — almost ungovernable. No wonder Collin Matjila’s political voice is troubled.