We are sitting in a wedding hall in downtown Fordsburg on a bright, sunny morning to listen to Johannesburg’s mayor, Herman Mashaba, deliver what is being billed as his “100 Days of Progress in Joburg”. This is not the usual site for such gatherings; this one has a distinctly inner city (ever so slightly foxed along the edges) feeling. The smell of curry being prepared wafts through the hall as the crowd gathers, and somebody’s idea of welcoming music is an infinite loop of drum rolls to a house music beat.

This “100 days” business is interesting. Where’d it come from? There is no real, organic reason for a progress report after three months or so, rather than, say, after the first six months. Thinking about it some, I remember that the origins of the phrase derive from Napoleon’s epochal “Hundred Days”. This was his campaign to retake the leadership of France after he had slipped away from his exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba – but before he bumped into the British and Prussian forces one last time in the muddy fields of Waterloo.

More recently, US President Franklin Roosevelt had called his initial period in office a “hundred days” as well, but that came at the nadir of the Great Depression and there was reason to reassure citizens that he and his administration were hard at work on a broad, improvisational effort to find something, anything, that could begin to turn the overwhelming economic disaster around – or at least give a dispirited American population some reason to hope that better times were coming. And so, 100 days has become a kind of measure of early successes and challenges, as well as the time to begin to judge such efforts.

Slowly, the room fills up and, amazingly, perhaps a first for Johannesburg or even South Africa, the event starts right on schedule. Exactly at eleven, just as promised in the invitation. One mayoral management committee member is the emcee, a second introduces the mayor, and a third offers brief closing remarks.

The audience endures the usual South African habit of acknowledging everyone in attendance who holds a job title that is more imposing than that of the building engineer, but, as soon as the mayor starts on his comments, he dives right in, castigating the waste, fraud and mismanagement – and the “outright looting” of civic resources, just as if their perpetrators had been those biblical moneychangers in the temple courtyard of Jerusalem. And then it is on to his increasingly familiar 10-point plan that he expects will mark his tenure – and that will serve as the measure of his success.

Most politicians like to leave a little wiggle room amid the rhetoric, just in case things are tougher to achieve than they are to promise would-be voters. The logic of such behaviour is like the old adage that explains that campaigning is like reciting poetry while governing is like reading the tax code. Exciting versus boring. But Mayor Mashaba is having very little of this customary waffle this time around. He wants his audience to know exactly where he’s at.

To be fair, Mashaba notes he is leading a multiple-party coalition and a tactical alliance with the Economic Freedom Fighters, rather than a simple DA majority. Nevertheless, he hails the peaceful transfer of power from the ANC to this new landscape as a signal accomplishment of South African democracy. To make the point that his administration is determined to be the people’s government, he says, “Never again will the residents of this City be abused by their government. Now, for the first time, the power has been transferred from government to the people of the City.”

The core of his message is that, “At the very heart of our new administration, at the DNA of our approach going forward, is the demand for change. This voice has grown from a quiet whisper of a few, to the loud shout of the many in our City after years of arrogant indifference exhibited by previous administrations….” (“Take that, you others,” he seems to be saying.) He goes on to say, “Behind these shouts are people who believe in the potential of a City that could be great, but they want a government who can lead this City to greatness. They want a government that will lead the way, which will clear the path of obstacles and will deliver the change that stimulates job creation, fast-tracks service delivery and stops corruption. But they want change to be delivered now, they don’t want it tomorrow, they don’t want it the day after that….

“Since I have come into office on the 23^rd of August 2016, 100 days ago, I have come to learn that the City is not what I thought it was during my election campaign. It is far, far worse than I had thought. It is important that I take the residents into my confidence now to explain what the true state of the City is that we have inherited.”

He explains that, like elected politicians everywhere else, he and his team must also live at first with the budget and development plans of his predecessor, at least until his folks get to redefine things with their own vision in succeeding budgets. Accordingly, what he has to work with now is a budget that is largely of the “same old, same old” variety, it shows no urgency for change, despite the verdict of the voters. While they will be able to amend parts of it early next year, they are still saddled with vanity projects “that look great on a billboard above the slogan ‘World Class African City’ but they do not improve anybody’s lives, and especially not the lives of the poor residents of our City.”

Mashaba told his audience, “The previous administration would spend your money advertising that it planned to spend R100-billion on capital expenditure in the City over the next 10 years. What they did not tell you on those radio adverts and billboards is that long-term neglect has produced a 10-year, R170-billion funding gap on capital infrastructure. The City stands at 42% of the debt-to-revenue ratio that National Treasury limits to 45% as a debt ceiling. Our ability to borrow further is highly limited.”

It is, as the mayor argues, a budgetary crisis that pre-eminently affects those who have the least and his budgets will be actively pro-poor once he can write them. With close to 900,000 unemployed people in Joburg, and an unemployment rate of over 30%, it is the city’s young people who are the real losers since new unemployed people keep joining the roster of those without jobs, and the city’s economic growth rate is barely 2%. While that is better than the country as a whole, of course, it is nowhere near the rate needed to bring down unemployment as well as to absorb all those new entrants that keep joining the labour force.

Simultaneously, the city’s housing backlog is over 300,000 spaces and it has been delivering only around 3,500 units per year. At that pace, it will take forever and a day to get past that problem. If ever. And this doesn’t even include the fierce urgency of addressing the needs of those in the city’s 180 informal settlements, the majority of whom subsist with no basic services at all. Invoking the tragedy of one family’s very public loss in the recent flash flooding in Alexandra, Mashaba says, “I ask you to picture the image of the Chauke family having to climb a tree to escape the flood water. Having to witness their three-year-old daughter, Everite, fall into the water to be swept away.” You can almost hear the waters rushing past, carrying away that small child. His voice softens as he closes the sale.

Then he turns to corruption. Without going into an extended list of all the gory details, he argues, “Since taking office, we have been inundated daily with cases of corruption, nepotism and fraud. It has gotten to the point where we could not investigate as quickly as the cases were rolling in. I have reports that range from City officials in Revenue who have collaborated with people to reduce their property valuations to reports where debt write-offs have been pursued on the sidelines. Corruption is not a strong enough term for what was taking place in the City. It was outright, shameless, looting.”

Besides that looting, Mashaba takes aim at what he has termed “institutionalised denialism”. What this seems to describe is that city officials have developed a long-time habit of erecting Potemkin villages of facts that are in defiance of the reality one actually sees around one. The mayor is not happy with performance of the city’s own police force, arguing it is woefully understaffed and that “lawlessness has become the order of the day in many parts of our City. By-laws have not become worth the paper that they are printed on”.

He will return later to the issue of by-laws as he describes his remedies for the fact that they have increasingly been ignored, but first he gives vent to what seems genuine anger over the decline of Jozi’s inner city, calling it “one of the greatest tragedies that we have inherited. The potential of our Inner City has been held back by allowing years of lawlessness, crime, grime and abandoned buildings going unattended to. Previous administrations have allowed our Inner City to be taken over by criminal elements, drug dealers and slumlords. We have over 115,000 people illegally occupying buildings in our Inner City, most of whom are living in the most appalling conditions.”

Even public interest lawyers do not entirely escape his wrath, as he chastises them for winning cases that have made the city responsible for providing emergency housing for those removed from substandard or hijacked buildings. For the mayor this is not some neo-platonist argument about how many angels will be doing legalistic gavottes on the heads of judicial pins. Instead, his point seems to be that such well-meaning actions end up subverting any real fairness for the many thousands who have waited patiently (or impatiently, perhaps) on the city’s various public housing lists for all these years. Or, as Mashaba says of such a strategy, what this seems to amount to is, “Occupy these buildings illegally and you can jump the queue? How is that fair?”

His anger continues about the wastefulness of spending on PR to promote the city’s international image and frequent international travel to conferences. As he said, “The essence of the problem was a City that was trying to run when it never walked. It would spend R153-million on mushroom farms and solar powered bakeries but not address the most fundamental service delivery challenges. It would waste time on executive committees of international bodies around the world while failing to address robot outages, billing problems, infrastructure backlogs, repairs and maintenance for its own people. It would merrily spend R340-million on a state-of-the-art council chamber when it could not electrify informal settlements, issue title deeds, or lift a finger to combat the rampant drug trade in our City.” Instead of the vanity projects, Mashaba insists Johannesburg’s government is coming back to the real work of a city government, focusing on getting the basics. To get there, Mashaba has refined his presentation to what he calls

The Ten Point Plan:

• First is to ensure the entire City adjust its mindset to the environment of a new coalition government.
• Second is to run a responsive, pro-poor government. Johannesburg’s government will listen to its people, and deal with them in a manner that is caring.
• Third will be to grow the Johannesburg economy to a minimum of 5% economic growth – as anything less will never reverse the city’s unemployment crisis.
• Fourth is to create a professional civil service in which the city’s employees will be aligned to the outcomes of service and an economic delivery agenda. The city’s civil servants must see their work as a calling, centred on the people they serve.
• Fifth is to declare corruption to be public enemy number one. This will be appointment of a professional investigator with a sweeping mandate. There will be a review of all tenders to see if any have been awarded to City employees, councillors or their families – and wrongdoers will be fired, funds recovered and the culprits get to do time. There is a new sheriff in town, clearly.
• Sixth is to produce a list of all semi-completed housing units within the City that require work in order for our people to take occupation of these units and take over completion of these 3,000 unfinished units.
• Seventh will be to create a comprehensive, official housing list, a list that is open and transparent, available to residents in government offices and on the City’s website to move beyond the frustrations and anger over the city’s housing management. As Mashaba said, “We cannot ask people, many of whom have been on housing lists for 20 years, to be patient with the slow roll-out of housing in our City, while the housing list remains in a shadow of doubt and suspicion.” Beyond the housing, there is the problem of illegal land occupation that comes from the frustrations of the interminable waits for city housing. While this cannot be solved overnight, he hopes to gain the citizens’ patience and acceptance as the city’s housing programmes begin to be better run.
• Eighth is to fast-track delivery of title deeds to beneficiaries of the City’s housing projects. Clear title will empower residents and provide them with tangible assets that can be leveraged for other economic purposes or passed on to subsequent generations as real property.
• Ninth is his pilot project of having a demonstration clinic operate for extended hours during the week and on Saturdays to help people receive medical attention without having to lose a day of work. Once this roll-out is carried out successfully, others will follow.
• The 10^th and final element of Mashaba’s plan is an effort – part economics, part inspiration and aspiration, to revitalise a once great inner city. Decrying the decay in what is still a valuable stock of buildings, the mayor has put his chips down on converting the city’s underused or vacant buildings into a vibrant mix of high-rise, low-cost and affordable housing, rental spaces for start-up companies and professionals unable to afford space in the upscale parts of the city, and, as such, something that could become “a model for a modern, post-apartheid, South African City”.

For the rest of his speech, the mayor offered up a litany of his early achievements, some already in place, some coming into view, and still others just over the horizon – but all aimed at clearing away the clutter, enforcing or reforming the by-laws, making investment in Jozi easier, and putting the city’s bureaucracies to work more efficiently.

The trick for this last element – and in some ways the foundation for the entire revival of the city – must come by getting some real buy-in from big business. Business leaders must become convinced their investments in such efforts will be both profitable for them as well as being real contributions to the city’s revitalisation and stability. And that, of course, means potential investors must begin to believe everyone is in this effort for the long haul, rather than just for the quick buck, the flip.

Mashaba argues that such investors “are the people with the balance sheets that can turn this City into a construction site within a matter of months.” Such a comment triggers an intriguing thought that such language echoes what Americans heard from their country’s two major party presidential candidates (and most especially Donald Trump) in the November election, both of whom had argued for a vast expansion of infrastructure investments and the harnessing of big business to do its share.

And so, at least in part, Mayor Mashaba is championing a kind of technocratic solution for the city’s woes – with himself as cheerleader in chief. This solution would include efficient, honest, transparent government; optimum decisions over spending priorities; and the building of partnerships with the region’s business community – and those beyond it – that will inevitably draw in a steady flow of investment capital. In turn, these investments will generate growth, new jobs, and the improvement of general well-being.

One challenge to this vision, of course, is that much of the landscape for investment decisions does not rest with Mayor Mashaba’s government – even if the city’s government becomes a sterling example of efficiency, honesty and single-mindedness of purpose. Instead, he, his government and the city as a whole are dependent on the decision-making of the national government and that government’s ability or failure to create a national climate that will attract investment, as well as generate broader political stability.

Beyond those variables, Mayor Mashaba’s goals will also be affected by the comparative, competitive investment climates in roughly comparable economies around the world, as well as the global conditions that encourage growth or barely avoid economic slowdowns. And none of these variables are within the mayor’s grasp, even as they are particularly important for his objective of fostering a 5% growth target.

Curiously, in watching and listening to the mayor’s speech, it was fascinating what was seemingly left out of his already-ongoing or planned efforts. While support for tourism received a brief mention, there was none of the vigorous arts and cultural world in Johannesburg that has been attracting people to it for decades from everywhere, even under apartheid. This sector creates jobs and helps contribute to the economy in many ways beyond just totalling up salaries, fees, and royalties received. And this sector could be a much bigger contributor to the city’s sense of itself as a vibrant place to live, work and play for its inhabitants and visitors alike with a bit of support and encouragement.

Similarly, leaving out any sense of how the mayor and his team will be engaging with the city’s two major universities and their thousands of well-educated professionals seems to be defining a growth and investment strategy largely limited to attracting outside investors, rather than figuring out how to support professional, scientific, technological and intellectual talent and capital already in the city and marrying this pool of talent with venture capital funds from home and abroad. One model for such development could be a city like Pittsburgh in the US. Once its old heavy industrial base of iron and steel had largely disappeared, after a wrenching period of adjustment, it retooled itself into being a hospitable platform for medical research, new medical technologies, and internationally renowned, top-tier education in the sciences and engineering.

Thinking further about the mayor’s presentation, how he understands the nature of a city’s power comes into play as well. Does he think of the city similarly to the way St Augustine had conceived of a city, as an aspirational thing, operating on a higher plane than the rest of society? Or is it the way the Rev John Winthrop had reshaped that idea into his “shining city upon a hill” metaphor to inspire early Puritan settlers in New England in the 17^th century to be better than their less spiritual competitors elsewhere?

Or does he see his goal to achieve “the city beautiful” or “the green city”, the American and British approaches aimed at ameliorating the harsh impacts of industrialiation and migration on growing cities in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries? Or, perhaps, does he line up with the ideas of the often-controversial urbanologist Edward Banfield, with his view that the chaos, confusion and dirt are actually the signs of a city thriving and growing? Or, even, does he fall in line with the German father of sociology, Max Weber, who saw the city – any city – as a kind of organic machine for creating a modern society and modern men? It would be intriguing to learn more about how Mayor Mashaba thinks of the city he is trying to tame and to lead.

In the end, as this writer so often does, he returns to the introductory pages of the anthology, From Joburg to Jozi (edited by the late Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts) in which Roberts writes,

“Though without embassies or a presidential palace, great spokes of roads arrive from all directions, train tracks snake here and thousands of taxi buses whizz to the centre. Crest a hill as you drive south from Pretoria, or stare from one of the city’s large parks, and Jo’burg’s towers rise as proudly as Oz above the poppy fields. People follow those tracks and pour to Jozi from all over the continent…. When South Africa learns to benefit from its migrants, just as America and Australia draw enormous economic strength from new arrivals, it will make sense also to talk, as the national airline does, of living a South African dream.

“Jozi is young and will transform. At little more than a century, it lacks the pedigree of Istanbul, Baghdad or Jerusalem, but there are signs that humans have lived here for thousands of years. They will remain a long time yet. Though the city is blighted with a bad name, there is also a deep sympathy for it….”

In keeping with Roberts’ sympathetic and optimistic judgement about Jozi, this city’s inhabitants will benefit from the mayor’s exploration and explanation of what it means to him for someone to be from Johannesburg, and what this city has meant, what it means now, and what it could mean in the future. He is surely right, even now, when Mashaba says, “Getting Johannesburg working is a project of national importance because, as I have always said, When Johannesburg Works, South Africa Will Work.” Now the task is to define and refine what he means by “works”. DM