In the same manner that his teachers threw out his dog’s breakfast homework, Johannesburg mayor Kabelo “Black John Steenhuisen” Gwamanda will be ditched as the city’s first citizen.
Having been elected Johannesburg’s fourth mayor since the November 2021 local government elections, from the Al Jama-ah party, which has a paltry three seats in the 270-seat council — a move that was as surprising as football club Kaizer Chiefs winning a match on Sunday — Gwamanda is about to be told he is the weakest link, in my best Fiona Coyne voice.
Plans are afoot to eject the 39-year-old Gwamanda like the garbage strewn across the once proud City of Gold, which has steadily deteriorated owing to the political instability which saw the appointment of a mayor who has the equivalent of a grade 10 certificate as his highest academic qualification.
You do not believe me?
In an interview with Eyewitness News in June last year, as quoted by IOL, Gwamanda conceded to having a national intermediate certificate as his highest qualification because, he added, he had far more pressing issues to attend to than a pesky education.
“Me focusing on building my family meant that I had to work harder than the rest of us in order for me to represent myself as best as I could in any environment,” he rambled, without expanding on how a teenager had pressure to ditch his textbooks in favour of starting and growing a family.
To be fair, former president Jacob Zuma also did not complete formal schooling and was able to rise through the ranks to allegedly waste nine years in the country’s highest political office.
Not to diminish his efforts to build a family and be the best he can be, it is hard to take Gwamanda seriously when one observes the filth piling up across Johannesburg as the taps run dry during the persistent water shortages.
What I take issue with, however, is Gwamanda trying to link himself with South Africa’s lifetime high school valedictorian Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen.
Steenie, as he is affectionately known to those of us he considers his frenemies, actually matriculated and is heading the agricultural ministry and department, his only qualifications for the post being a beer belly resembling Frikkie the Farmer’s.
However, Steenie completed grade 12.
But Gwamanda, speaking like someone who has guzzled gallons of Smirnoff Guaranas, gathered the gall to call himself the “black version” of The Smurfs party leader while slamming investigations into his educational qualifications.
“Is it a qualifying criteria [education qualification], influence or determined by my pigmentation?” the soon-to-be-jilted Johannesburg head honcho asked, whipping out the race card faster than a trickster at a magic show.
“I am an indigenous child of the soil and I possess the intelligence necessary to lead my people in the direction required,” Gwamanda added.
Well, it seems that intelligence was not good enough, after ActionSA’s announcement on Monday that it would vote with the ANC to remove Gwamanda at the next council meeting on 29 or 30 July.
Mind you, the Herman Mashaba-led ActionSA has repeatedly stated that it would never work with the “evil ANC”, which it has blamed for the slow progress in South Africa as well as the rampant corruption.
However, in an about-turn that rivals the Economic Freedom Fighters’ flip-flopping, ActionSA said its blood would be black, green and gold when it came to removing Gwamanda, who they referred to as a “compromised individual”.
“We need to be clear; we need to put behind us the Gwamanda era and move on because, quite frankly, very little can be as bad as the Gwamanda era has been,” said Michael Beaumont, the national chairperson of ActionSA, which has 44 seats in the council.
“We cannot sit back as ActionSA and allow a metro like Johannesburg to decline and decay the way it has and sit on our hands — our 44 pairs of hands — in Johannesburg by clinging to a principle that we will not work with other political parties,” Beaumont added, excusing his party’s about-turn, while proving the adage that there are no permanent enemies in politics.
His announcement follows the Mail & Guardian reporting on 19 July that Dada Morero — the ANC’s Johannesburg regional chairperson and the city’s mayoral committee member responsible for finance — is expected to replace Gwamanda in this metro’s latest round of mayoral music chairs.
Whether Gwamanda will use the time away from the mayoral chair to upskill himself remains to be seen.
What I do hope, however, is that the country’s economic hub will cease looking like a monstrous morning meal made for a mongrel.
