Johannesburg: Grinch council can’t pinch our spirit

Johannesburg people are simply the best. There is no problem you can throw at us that we won't solve. The water crisis: people have already organised disaster groups for if and when the taps run dry. Boreholes are sunk and opened for communities by churches, mosques and community groups. This resilience empowers us and fuels our determination.

The roads nightmare: we fix our potholes and trim kerbs for visibility and gees. Robots out: no worries; the homeless community has you covered. The city keeps going and growing. The Jozi My Jozi programme, a business and civil society partnership, has cleaned the inner city and returned it to hope, starting by switching on the lights of the iconic Nelson Mandela Bridge.

The efforts of Johannesburg’s resourceful citizens are endless: giving, sharing and organising on WhatsApp groups that keep the city going, alongside good officials in entities like Joburg Water and City Power. I pen a praise song to Joburg's people because our city government can't pinch the spirit of our people as hard as it bloody tries. I have covered some wicked and gormless political administrations in my time and, it has to be said, this Grinch of a city council takes the wreath this Christmas for being spoilers.

We have no street-light network any longer, and while the rest of South Africa has a respite from load shedding, it is not here in the City of Gold. Regular outages are our reality. Many people will be without water this Christmas as the system reaches its end of life with no real plan other than water-shedding and water-throttling to keep the taps running intermittently.

When we vote again in 2026, it will be a clean sweep. Until then, we will keep making it happen as the outstanding citizens of this great city that we are.

And we will keep the people elected and employed to do their jobs on their toes until then. It's unfathomable that fewer than 42,000 people (41,000 staff and many of the 270 councillors – a few are outstanding councillors) can hold more than five million hard-working, productive and hustling citizens to ransom. This city wants to be the modern African metropolis it so easily can be, but we need a responsive, modern and kind government that is centred on people, not power, to build it. DM