Ask yourself, City of Joburg — Who let the dogs out in the war on us?

“Stop the alienation of our parks, dams and koppies,” said the flyer stuck under my windscreen wiper while I was parked at the park – that is, the area between Marks Park and the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens in Emmarentia that’s generally known as the Dog Park. I’m not sure it has official capital letters, but let’s put them in.

I would possibly have put an exclamation mark in that top line, there – “Stop the alienation of our parks, dams and koppies!” Now doesn’t that look and feel better?

Stop! Stop the alienation!

I’d even take that “alienation” out of inverted commas, except that here it is being used in a specialist manner. Something to do with property, zoning and how uses can be changed by, among other means, the fiat of the City of Joburg, with a bit of public consultation thrown in.

That consultation with us, the mere rate-paying, voting citizens of the city, will probably be scheduled for the hours of midnight to 2am, on a weeknight, and held in one of the rented buildings in which the CoJ does its work, if you can call it work, the actual Civic Centre having more or less fallen into disrepair, which is to say it’s a wreck, and CoJ, it seems, can’t fix it.

So many things the CoJ can’t fix... Which reminds one of all the things City Power, Joburg Water and the Joburg Roads Agency can’t fix. Things the provincial government can’t fix, things the national government and Cyril Ramaphosa can’t fix...

I’d also put an apostrophe into “Joburg”, in the “City of Joburg” formulation, except it doesn’t deserve one.

Alienation, then. What the CoJ means is that the 173ha that “belong to the people”, to quote the flyer, will be alienated from their original uses and turned into something else.

Housing, say, if a big developer gets on board and pays the right bribes to the right people in the upper echelons of the CoJ, if those people haven’t just been voted out of office or otherwise placed under a cloud of suspected, proven or other malfeasance.

“The City wants to sell off 173ha of our land,” says the flyer, going on to list the entities or spaces under threat: “Marks Park, UJ Sports Grounds, Westdene Dam, Froggy Pond, Melville Koppies, the Botanical Gardens, Protea Sports Club and the rest of our greenbelt.

“They’re calling it ‘alienation’,” the author(s) of this strongly worded warning continue(s). “Let’s call it what it is: handing public land to private interests.”

The online dictionary I consulted, I forget its name, defines “alienation” as “a withdrawing or separation of a person or a person’s [huh?] affections from an object or position of former attachment”. So that’s the personal meaning, the meaning that does not apply to property. This is the part that relates to “the people”.

You can almost imagine those high-ups in the CoJ discussing the matter, perhaps over a tray of newly foamed cappuccinos brought in from the deli next door to the hired office.

“Oh, what does it matter?” says an office bearer or financial adviser. “Alienation? Hah! I spit upon your alienation.

“Look, we, the ANC, the ruling party – with or without the cooperation of various slippery smaller parties that change allegiances like they change their underwear, possibly more frequently – are past masters at alienation.

“We’ve alienated the middle class in Johannesburg, yes. We’ve lost their vote. It’s gone. So who gives a shit about them? They’re the ones who trundle through the park daily with their damn dogs, having a great deal of early-morning fun, while the people – the real people – starve in their hovels.

“Why should we pay any attention to these bourgeois idiots? We’ve destroyed their property values, as well befits a fake-communist regime (property is theft, remember). We did that by letting infrastructure decay and fall apart – and it was a doddle!

“But we’d better do this before we alienate any more of our traditional ANC voters, though they are amazingly faithful, given how few of our election promises we actually manage to fulfil. We still haven’t built those million low-cost houses, have we?”

(He is addressing the MEC for housing, of which there isn’t much, informal settlements, of which there are too many, and general property mismanagement. She will in fact be in charge of this very process, this alienation of the green spaces of the city so that the CoJ can pocket a few more millions – millions it will doubtless spend in about 10 minutes. After all, R10-million is just about the budget for one day’s catering if there’s a council meeting on.)

“Yes, we will promise more low-cost housing, to be built right on top of our heritage sites and the beloved park and recreation spaces in the area! That’ll enrage the bourgeois and they’ll look very bad protesting against low-cost housing, won’t they?”

And so we, the bourgeois, prepare for another battle. The battle to keep the water flowing from our taps and the battle to keep the lights on are largely lost, it would seem, so we might as well go all in on a last battle – a final war to keep our green spaces. They are, after all, among the last few things in the City of Johannesburg that make it bearable to actually live here.

Mayor Dada Morero, in his sleepy fashion, recently declared war on potholes. Now we all know that potholes are a major problem in Joburg and that war should indeed be declared upon them, at least in a manner that fires up the CoJ’s foot soldiers. War does that. This kind of intervention is what the ANC used to call “armed propaganda”, and it worked for the party when it was fighting apartheid. Trouble is the arms have been sold to some gangsters on the Cape Flats, so it’s now unarmed propaganda.

But, certainly, we can declare war. Just as previous metropolitan and national regimes have declared war on gender-based violence, or on corruption or anything else, we the people can declare war on alienation. We can declare war on the CoJ itself, just as it has declared war on good governance, clean finances, stable administrations, etc – in fact, it’s as though the CoJ has declared war on the City of Johannesburg itself. It has alienated itself from itself and its supposed purpose in this world.

So, war it is! Let slip the dogs... DM

Shaun de Waal is a writer and editor.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.