Ferial Haffajee : TAKING STOCK
>From the Top of Africa we look down on one of the continent’s largest cities. Johannesburg. At the top of the Carlton Centre (now called the Top of Africa), the city looks like a mini-land. Cars rush about on highways that criss-cross the city linking Sandton in the north with Soweto in the south. The city plan is clear at this dizzy height. An inner city at the hub, the suburbs on the rim and the townships hidden far away.
It’s bustling from up above. Little people bob about. Yellow cranes swing on a construction site – a major investment by one of the big banks – striking a picture of prosperity. In the east an aeroplane takes off and cuts across the purple dusk sky.
The image is postcard pretty. It looks like a good place to visit, a great place to work, a moneyed town. It’s easy to see why millions of South Africans have been drawn to this city, why across the continent, Johannesburg is seen as a place of opportunity. From Morocco up north to neighbouring Zimbabwe, continental cousins have trekked to Johannesburg where many complain that business is slow, but still better than home.
Once you take the lift down to the pavements below, the cracks in the concrete jungle start to show and the postcard folds at the edges. The streets are dirty, buildings empty and the buses belch black smoke.
At the Carlton Centre, the parking lot is near empty on a weekday; a symbol of big business’s flight from the city. In the financial district, there is talk of plans to fence off mining capital’s building into an “Oppenheimer Park” to defend its space from the onslaught of people, hawkers and crime.
In the suburbs and outlying business districts like Sandton and Roodepoort, they talk of meltdown. Pristine streets are getting dirtier, the grass is overgrown, garbage is collected intermittently. In many townships and squatter camps, the situation is far worse. In Alexandra, the council seems to have given up the ghost, if the overflowing toilets, blocked drains and stinking rubbish tips are anything to go by.
The mining town has ballooned. Its politics have changed and now city government must provide services to a range of citizens. Three years of cumbersome new structures set up after the local election of 1995 have made things worse.
With a budget of more than R7-billion, the city is owed R2,1-billion, of which it plans to write off half in the next two years because there is little chance of claiming it from residents. It has long- term debt of R2,8-billion.
With a new team in place to manage the mega-city that Johannesburg will become after the local elections in 2001, the lid has been lifted on just how badly managed this city is. It’s no wonder that services haven’t been extended in any meaningful way to the townships.
Bureaucrats don’t bill for half the water Johannesburg’s councils provide. “Johannesburg is the jewel in the South African crown,” says Roland Hunter, the city’s chief financial officer-designate. “It can operate in a financially sound way.”
Johannesburg has two imperatives. It is what is called a “developmental authority” which places it at the coalface of providing services to those who have never had them.
Its larger imperative is even more daunting. “Securing the city means securing the nation,” says AbdoMaliq Simone of the Public and Development Management School at Wits University. He points out that “Africa is an increasingly urban continent”.
South Africa’s six metropolitan areas are the locus of most of the income generated for the public purse. “The metro areas will sustain the state. These are the economic powerhouses of Southern Africa,” says Mike Sutcliffe who is the newly appointed head of the Municipal Demarcation Board.
City managers have come up with a two-year plan called “iGoli 2002. Getting the basics right.”
At its is heart a plan to make the greater Johannesburg council operate like a business. It will create utilities for water, electricity and sanitation provision so that these operate as individual businesses. In theory this will enable them to secure their own funds (banks are hesi- tant to touch the council) and to turn a profit to cross-subsidise the council’s other work.
Similarly, the city’s roads, stormwater drains, parks and cemeteries will be run like mini-businesses within the council so that staff can work to performance targets.
The longer 10-year plan is to make Johannesburg a global city with links to global market-places. Igoli will sell itself as “The pulse of Africa” and the continent’s leading city.
It wants to position itself as a financial centre with a thriving producer services sector to which major corporations will flock. A small part of its plan is to create markets which will house hawkers – an attempt to formalise the highly informal.
A major reason for getting its infrastructure up and running efficiently is that investors are attracted to big cities. Councillor Kenny Fihla says: “We cannot limit our horizons to just Africa.” In time, the cities will take on greater economic and political importance than the provinces. Says Sutcliffe: “City managers and mayors could be more prominent on the international stage than some provincial premiers.”
Like the Top of the Carlton that has become the Top of Africa, this city has found its geographical space. Despite the art deco and modernist architecture copied from European trends, it is a super-African city in the mould of Nairobi, with as many millions as the populous Khartoum and Kinshasa.
Johannesburg’s economy is growing increasingly informal.
Its city pavements have become trading floors where fake Taiwanese takkies sit next to Afro-chic outfits. Office blocks have been commandeered by small businesses running everything from schools, to hairdressing salons, small manufacturing concerns and brothels.
Like other continental cities it is developing urban agriculture: in Berea, migrants grow mealies and sugar cane, and in some Hillbrow flats bathtubs have become seedbeds for tomatoes which are later sold on the streets.
The city has drawn networks of traders and new business interests. It has also been a magnet for criminal networks, big and small. In one section of town, a network sells “intelligence” – the time occupants leave their flats, the habits of shopkeepers, the numbers of police officers – to the highest bidder who may either be criminals or residents who pay them not to sell what they know.
“One only has to consider the levels of everyday corruption and the rapid conversion of many formerly crime-free urban areas into danger zones to track the acceleration of disintegration taking place,” says Simone. He is describing a generalised African trend, but it befits large parts of Johannesburg.
Increasingly the challenge of Johannesburg’s chiefs will be not only the delivery of services to residents and the maintenance of grassy verges. It must also manage the fine balancing act between the city’s global aspirations and its African reality.