I’ve just paid my third visit in as many months to Johannesburg, and I’ve given up the fight in my brain to write it off as a lost cause. The fact is, it’s a fabulous city, vibrant, friendly and rich. Despite all the bad publicity it gets, it’s a serious, powerful and massive place. All those folk struggling to sell their houses and move to the Cape should relax. Help is on the way.
It’s true I now live in a quiet little village in the Western Cape and my view of Johannesburg, where I spent 20 wonderful working years, may be a little uneducated. I haven’t gone for weeks without water or electricity. That doesn’t happen where I live now.
My wife and I go to Cape Town often. It’s not far, and the restaurants might literally be the best in the world. But Johannesburg, for my money, poorly managed as it is, is the better city.
It’s being cynically cleaned up now for the G20 summit, but even discounting that it’s more welcoming and more settled.
Joburg is open and friendly. Cape Town can be a little snobby. You never quite belong.
I worked for years in Madrid, in Spain, and Joburg has the same feel. They’re both in the middle of nowhere really, with clear skies, hectic traffic and querulous citizens. But anyone can move to Johannesburg and feel at home.
Barcelona, on the other hand, is to Madrid what Cape Town is to Johannesburg. It’s gorgeous, and the food is divine, but the people are what the Spanish call “pijo”. As you say that in Madrid you brush the front of your nose upwards with your index finger. It’s not a place to make friends.
So it’s engrossing to watch former DA leader Helen Zille leave her long-term home in Cape Town and hard-launch her campaign to become mayor of Joburg (where she grew up) next year.
Zille is arguably the most combative and industrious politician in our democratic history. With large parts of Joburg (the bits not being cleaned up for the G20 delegates) still a disgraceful and decomposing mess, it is perfect for her. She’s brave and she’ll fix it.
Zille will be mayor, and property prices will rise, and the filth will be cleaned, and the water will run
Mess gets her going. I’ve seen video of her cleaning filthy, paper-strewn municipal offices in rural Mpumalanga, and she never stops. Once fired up, she is formidable.
She will be mayor, and property prices will rise, and the filth will be cleaned, and the water will run. She’s addicted to the fight.
But Max Hastings, the British military historian, commenting on the poor performance of Field Marshal Lord Gort VC, the leader of the British expeditionary force in France forced to flee to Dunkirk by the Germans in 1940, makes the bitter point that the mind required to win the Victoria Cross may not be the mind to command an army.
“An exaggerated regard for courage,” he writes, “can lead to remarkably stupid men” being promoted to high command.
Zille is by no measure “stupid”, heaven forfend, but while her single-mindedness may be perfect for battle in Joburg it has not, strategically, done her party much good.
The DA languishes at around 21% of the national vote almost as if that were its target, no matter how feeble the ANC.
She is the architect, who, after years of personally trying and failing to find black leaders for the DA, turned the party on its head so that it today does not mention race at all in its policies. In this country, with black voters the only route to 30% nationally, this is surely crazy.
It’s a huge stretch, but imagine the victorious Allies, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, deciding not to mention the word “Jew” in their postwar reconstruction?
Israel would have been handed over to generic “victims”, and defenders of the new policy of avoiding the word “Jew” would argue that we all know who the victims were anyway. It’s not right. The Holocaust and apartheid are not remotely comparable but the both had victims and they both need recompense.
DA members gathered this week underneath big new billboards on the N1 around Johannesburg which the party has set up for the G20 delegates to see as they travel to the venue for the summit.
“BEE made ANC elites rich,” says one, “and left SA poor. Choose real opportunities for all, vote DA.” That’s Zille for you. Full of fight. Tactically it’s strong, and my go-to pollster, Dawie Scholtz, reckons she’ll take the DA beyond 30% of the vote in the local polls, from 25.5% in 2021, while the ANC slides below 30%.
She’ll have to form a governing metro coalition. For her the fighting tactic will work. But it’s no strategy for the country come 2029.
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