A dynamic team is driving the vision of Johannesburg as the motor of African growth – and not not the Third World slum it is in danger of becoming
Bafana Khumalo
A trio of knights has ridden into the city of Johannesburg with plans to bring it back from the abyss. On the biggest steed is councillor Kenny Fihla, head of the city’s transformation legotla, a body set up to oversee and manage the city’s change. He is flanked by city manager Ketso Gordhan and the new chief financial officer, Roland Hunter.
These are unlikely knights – hounded, jailed and exiled by the former regime that set up separate municipal structures for each racial grouping, leading to duplication of services and wastage of resources. “That is one of the first things that is going. We used to have 13 metropolitan substructures, all providing the same service,” says Gordhan. The number has been cut to four, to be unified into a single structure after local elections in 2001.
As the new city manager, Gordhan puts in a day that starts, on average, at seven in the morning and ends at eight in the evening. His days are packed full of meetings, mainly with developers who come to peddle housing projects.
The subject matter of these meetings ranges from a development designed to link Johannesburg and Soweto via the Bara-Link Project to a scheme devised by a group of French developers who propose building a city, providing all the amenities and collecting the rent, thereby cutting the city council out of the equation. “We can build 10 000 units and be up and running in …” is a regular refrain
Gordhan’s appointment – he started on January 4 – was not greeted by the usual opposition cries of “drop in standards” and “jobs for pals”. “I had their support because of what I was able to achieve in transport,” he says, explaining that in his role as director general in the Department of Transport he and Minister Mac Maharaj were able to – among other things – bring down taxi violence.
At 37, he has been around the political scene for some time, having started as a United Democratic Front activist. “Those were the days when one worked without pay and I had to pay the office telephone bill,” he says.
While the advent of democracy brought about a number of new-regime workers whose idea of change was to fire all the grey-suited and grey-shoed officials, Gordhan is representative of an even newer regime which seeks to work with available resources, changing the focus to suit current conditions.
One of the first big things he has done in his new appointment is to unveil the “iGoli 2002” plan, a bold two-year scheme designed to turn Johannesburg around. “For the next two years, planning is banned in this department,” he says. “Implementing is what we are doing.”
What has been implemented already is the building of a new taxi rank next to Johannesburg station. In the pipeline is a plan to build an off-ramp into the Newtown Cultural Precinct, an attempt to woo back to the city the white masses who used to come into the area to eat, to shop, to go to the theatre.
Areas like Yeoville, which are emerging ghettoes, are going to be declared improvement districts, “which means that they are going to get special treatment in terms of allocation of funds for urban renewal projects”.
The political knight, Fihla, has a sense of gravity about him. At 32, he is a considered speaker who has the tone of an elder statesman. “By September this year construction will have started on the M1 off-ramp into the cultural precinct and by June next year there will be at least four cranes on four different development sites in Johannesburg.” That’s what is in the pipeline for the city of gold. As chair of the transformation legotla, he is in a position to confidently state these plans for the city.
Born and raised in Soweto, Fihla’s curriculum vitae contains the now-normal experience of many of our civil servants: activist at a young age, detention, finally “skipping the border” for training in the art of war – in Fihla’s case in Zimbabwe where he enrolled for a chemical engineering degree at Zimbabwe Polytechnic.
That might seem to be a lifetime ago now. Instead of working out how to blow up buildings, he has taken up a portfolio that includes the responsibility for trying to solve overcrowding in the inner-city residential areas.
These are young activists who are speaking a new language, a language far removed from phrases like “flat rate”, “rent boycott” and “slum lords”. Now they speak the more disciplined language of a government in dire financial straits. Terms like “corporatisation”, “revenue generation” and “streamlining” are part of their lexicon.
If appearances are anything to go by, Fihla will be around to see the implementation of these plans. He is clearly in the inner circle of the African National Congress, recently seen on the hustings with both President Nelson Mandela and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki.
The new city fathers seem to share a lack of bitterness against the previous incumbents. Fihla remarks at the end of the interview, walking down the air-conditioned wood panelled corridor: “Ten years ago we would not have walked down here this freely. A lot has changed.”
Gordhan is slightly more practical: “Why do you think I meet with big business? It’s not because I like them, it’s because I realise that we can use them to the advantage of the people of Johannesburg.”
While Fihla and Gordhan dream of a city that is user-friendly for all its dwellers, Hunter (41) will be responsible for ensuring that they do that without wasting money. His experience includes working for Planact, an NGO that concerns itself with issues of urban development.
Like his counterparts he involved himself in illegal activity. As a conscript in the old South African Defence Force, he supplied the then-banned ANC with military information regarding the army’s activities in Mozambique. This earned him a five-year sentence in prison.
Hunter has most recently served as Gauteng’s chief accounting officer, in charge of a provincial budget of R15- billion. From May, he will be on a two-year contract with the city and he has to impress his bosses and balance the budget to help turn the city around.
If Hunter, Gordhan and Fihla fail, it will bode ill for the rest of the country, and possibly for the continent.