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Count your blessings - Johannesburg is crumbling, but it still (sort of) works

Count your blessings - Johannesburg is crumbling, but it still (sort of) works
Shaun de Waal
By Shaun de Waal
18 Oct 2024
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Be thankful we have escaped the ravages that afflict our neighbours for they are worse than those that afflict us, though Panyaza Lesufi is smoothing the path for more affliction, while the commies cry, “Long live the king”.

As the sewage gushed luxuriantly from the blocked drain into my garden, I joked: “It’s like living in KwaZulu-­Natal!” Luckily I didn’t have to live in that KZN-of-the-mind for too long. The Joburg Water people were at my place in good time, a mere 12 hours or so after I’d reported the “fault”, and the problem was ultimately sorted out.

It did take two trucks: the first responders told me they’d have to call the truck with the long pipe and the pump, because it would be able to push enough water into the blocked drain to unblock it. In the end, it took two tries. The second truck piped and pumped, then ran out of water. They said they’d go and refill and be back soon, and, thank heavens, they were.

Encountering further blockages, they checked the house over the road, which in fact had sewage garnished with bits of toilet paper running down the side of the driveway into the road, and found there was some kind of entry point there through which they could reach the big sewerage pipe under the road. They muttered about how the Joburg Roads Agency had tarred over the old manholes that used to be along the side of the road, but they got on with it.

Low-level stagger


They cleared the pipe, and I could have jumped for joy. Well, I did a kind of low-level stagger and a hop on one foot, and felt that would have to do. I handed out two-litre bottles of cooldrink and they were gone.

I’m not usually a fan of much discussion of cloacal matters, but in this instance I feel I have to spell it out – and I must register my gratitude. Those who are grateful for whatever they’re grateful for, the internet tells us, tend to live longer and have better lives in the period leading up to that delayed death. So I’m grateful for the clearing of my, our, the street’s blocked drains. I’m grateful, too, that I don’t live in KZN.

And while we’re on the subject of gratitude, let me express my appreciation for the new(ish) outpost of Home Affairs at Cresta Shopping Centre. I went there to apply for a new passport, having somehow got deadlocked in the online application process. I wasn’t supposed to go there until I’d completed the application and been given an appointment, but I went to tell them I couldn’t complete it, the helpline had been no help, and this was now getting urgent.

After some exasperated huffing, a staffer referred me to one of the consultants, who did help a lot. I imagine a rolling of the eyes as the staffer handed me over, but that would be entirely justifiable. I was treated like the granddad who didn’t understand technology and had to be talked through it with great patience, and I accepted that characterisation in exchange for the patience.

It was pointed out to me precisely what I’d done wrong in the online application process, and I fixed it.

Then, with gratitude pouring from every pore, I made the appointment for the biometrics, the next step in the process, and thanked everyone profusely.

So there are two major things I’m grateful for, and I trust that by the end of the year I will have found a third.

A rather spiteful view


Trouble is, when I get grateful, I also get ungrateful. Let’s go back to the sewage issue. I was very grateful they’d been able to restore the usual programming (that is, when the s**t just disappears down the pipe), but it did make me think about living in Gauteng. I may be grateful that I don’t live in KZN, but that is in itself a rather spiteful view, and I’m increasingly ungrateful that I live in Gauteng.

I don’t like the way the richest, most productive city in Africa is falling apart, that property prices have dropped so far that my house is worth only two-thirds of what I paid for it – and I feel bad, too, that my issues are those of the middle class, and not even the new middle class: compared to what the precariat suffers, my issues are negligible. Some places in South Africa do not merely have sewage running down their streets – they’re practically drowning in it.

But I still have to detest the Gauteng provincial government and the City of Johannesburg administration that let the city crumble while they were busy looting and backstabbing.

I had mixed feelings, thus, about the story that Fikile Mbalula, the former minister of taxis and now general ANC factotum, had summoned Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi to Luthuli House to answer for his apparent undermining of the Government of National Unity. Lesufi had shafted the DA-led coalition in the city, installed a puppet mayor from a party with barely a seat in the legislature, and reinstalled the ANC administration that is essentially responsible for the city’s decline, as well as a host of other malfeasances.

Lesufi’s own people in the Gauteng legislature are busy defending themselves against charges of taking travel stipends in large amounts but not actually travelling; I think it’s 34 of them, including the deputy speaker and chief whip, who are currently feeling those charges slide off their backs like sewage down a newly opened pipe.

Mbalula, it seems, made a sterling effort to put Lesufi off his stride, charging him with bringing the ANC into disrepute by undermining the ANC’s pact with the DA that forms the basis of the GNU.

Lesufi, obviously, would much rather be in bed with the EFF and MK Party, to which, as a populist given to making promises he can’t or won’t keep, he is naturally drawn.

Overplayed his hand


But our Fiks, unfortunately, overplayed his hand. One shouldn’t be surprised: when did Mbalula underplay anything?

He’s not capable of subtlety, nuance or careful building of a case. No, he went off half-cocked, you might say. Lesufi, it was reported, responded to Mbalula’s charges with “facts”, and the high-ups at the relevant meeting eventually gave up trying to prosecute the case against Lesufi. There ain’t no facts like Lesufi facts.

The underlying accusation, it seems, was that the ANC did very badly in Gauteng in this year’s elections – a fact Lesufi couldn’t refute, but he’s very good at distraction and diversion. He accused the high-ups of not defending him and other Gauteng leaders when the DA said they were all mafiosi, and they dropped the matter.

There seems to be a lesson here for politicians who are mafiosi, but I’m not entirely sure what it is except “Brazen it out!”

We must be grateful for the grim chuckle that arises when the SACP, once the intellectual powerhouse within the ANC, shows it’s declining as badly as Johannesburg’s sewers. The commies came out in support of Lesufi the populist, lambasting those who “dared to touch (Our Glorious Brother Leader) Panyaza Lesufi”. Do not touch him! And then, for another chuckle, they blamed the DA’s Catherine the Great, Helen Zille, for interfering. Another Lesufi staple: blame the DA. What was funny was the way the SACP referred to “these forces like the DA’s Helen Zille” – “forces”! Obviously a special word for the ANC (SACP Tendency), just like “touch”.

We all, and especially those drowning in sewage, must be grateful for these learnings. DM

Shaun de Waal is a writer and editor.

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

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