The real saboteurs are those who mismanage Joburg and can’t put a plan together to protect it
Being a metropolitan municipality has its benefits. Not only does it have the use of the South African Police Services, but anybody who’s ever been around Johannesburg knows the power of the metro cops. Yet Joburg can’t seem to stop the vandals and saboteurs.
A new tactic to address this seems to be ignoring the last 10 years and expecting us to believe that bashing of street lights is some sort of protest action ahead of the G20. As if every street light has been burning successfully until a few weeks ago, and we never had infrastructure theft.
If you believe this narrative, you’ll also believe that illegal electricity connections are merely imaginative and copper cable thieves are actually tender service providers, clearing the way for fibre optics.
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Joburg’s infrastructure problems are not new
What’s the G20 got to do with the price of a metre of stolen railway? Law enforcement has been unable to protect the city’s infrastructure since apartheid leveraged infrastructure decay to enforce segregation.
There aren’t enough cops to man each light post — and even if there were, anyone caught would be unlikely to get into much trouble. This isn’t something solved with policing. Trying to claim this as sabotage in the lead-up to the G20 is unhelpful and disingenuous.
Maybe there are those who are taking the opportunity of having the world’s eyes on us to make a statement, but it’s not like these are new problems. And if they aren’t new problems, you can’t blame them on new things. At the very most, you can say that new situations exacerbate the old problems, but even then, the problem has forever been huge.
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The City of Joburg is so confused about its infrastructure, you may even make a safe bet that the streetlights outside will be burning at 3pm, but not 3am. The traffic lights have long been so dysfunctional that insurers have dedicated whole marketing budgets to paying traffic wardens. How long and how much did it take to fix Lilian Ngoyi Street after the gas explosion? And yet, we’re expected to believe that saboteurs are the problem.
Real saboteurs are those who mismanage Joburg
Maybe saboteurs are the problem. It’s just that it’s not the saboteurs you’re expecting. The end product of the problem, sure, are the ones throwing rocks at the lights. But that’s only at the end of the line. The real saboteurs are the enablers; the ones who mismanage, upset and can’t put a plan together to protect the city.
How many times in the last year has the president himself lamented the state of eGoli? And it’s not like these problems pop-corned overnight.
Naturally, we should be glad that there’s attention to fixing some problems thanks to the G20 Summit. Moreover, we should be concerned that it takes a G20 Summit to catalyse this kind of urgency of maintenance… as if international visitors deserve better than our own residents.
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What’s scary is that government has managed to find a way to turn even this G20 Summit into an excuse for its own failures. Oh, don’t worry. These aren’t problems we face daily. It’s just some disgruntled people taking advantage of international attention to raise their gripes… but don’t ask us what their gripes are because that will make us look bad.
Of course, nothing should justify vandalism, just like nothing should justify ignoring the genesis of the vandalism. To try to justify either doesn’t do the thing we need most: fix the problems.
You don’t fix the problems by simply raising concerns and blaming the closest thing to you. You fix the problems by actually addressing them.
