I couldn’t agree more with both the headline and the concluding sentence of this publication’s editor Sibongakonke Shoba’s column last Friday.
Johannesburg, just like the rest of SA, does need new ideas and innovative ways to govern it properly.
How ironic then that the three candidates among whom the next mayor is most likely to come are all on the wrong side of 60 and have been in politics – informally or formally – at least since the early 1980s.
Helen Zille – who has so far made the Johannesburg mayoral race the focal point of the media coverage of this year’s local government elections due to her prominent personality and in-your-face United States-type of electioneering – turned 75 in March this year.
Herman Mashaba, the successful entrepreneur Zille recruited into the DA and made him Johannesburg mayor in 2016 before letting him ousted amidst claims he had allowed Julius Malema’s EFF to pull him by his mayoral chain, is turning 67 next month.
Mashaba, who quit the DA soon after being ousted as mayor, set up his own stall in the form of Action SA under whose banner he’ll be trying to return to the mayoral chain on November 4 this year.
The status of the third candidate has not been officially confirmed yet. But if reports from yesterday’s Sunday Times are to be believed, the ANC is about to announce respected cleric, anti-apartheid Struggle hero and former director-general in Thabo Mbeki’s presidency Frank Chikane as its mayoral candidate.
He turned 75 in January.
According to the report, the party that has ruled Johannesburg for most of the past three decades of democracy has settled on Chikane as its candidate, ahead of the incumbent Dada Morero and the ANC’s Johannesburg chairperson Loyiso Masuku.
If that is the case, it would hardly surprise anyone. Although Morero talks a big deal about grand plans to revive the city, most people associate much of Johannesburg’s failures with him mainly because he has been at the centre of successive and disastrous metro administration either as MEC for finance or as mayor.
It would be a risk for an ANC that has been shedding support in Johannesburg since 2016 – and shows little signs of recovering – to have the reviled Morero as the face of its campaign.
Masuku, on the other hand, is considered a political lightweight to take on Zille and Mashaba, plus her rise to the chairpersonship of the ANC in the region was on the back of one of the factions that have caused the party to lose support in the city over the years.
By contrast, Chikane has none of the baggage that comes with the other two. He is from a generation of ANC leaders that is associated with self-sacrifice rather than the self-enrichment ethos that seems to drive those who have come to lead the party structures since the early 2000s.
The ANC is probably also banking on voters, especially in Soweto and other historically-ANC supporting areas, remembering with fondness the courageous role he played leading community struggles during the dark days of political repression where many of the leaders were either in jail, exile, in hiding or killed.
According to one of the leaders quoted anonymously by the newspaper, Chikane will bring “stature, credibility and integrity” to the ANC’s campaign. And we all know that the party desperately needs all of those if it is to get a decent shot at staying in power in Johannesburg.
But what does all of this say about the state of our politics that, in the country’s richest city, the biggest parties have had to go to individuals who should be quietly enjoying their pensions for help?
In a city with so much skill and talent, how come neither the DA nor the ANC can find younger and vibrant leaders with a demonstrable track record in academia, business, civil society, and governance willing to raise their hands for mayorship?
Johannesburg may have a lot of problems, but lack of leadership talent is not one of those. You can go to any sector, both private or public, you’d be spoiled for choice. So why aren’t any of them interested in coming to help fix the broken city when they know that the success or failure of their private businesses as well as their ability to live comfortable lives as residents is dependent on having a working Johannesburg?
The answer must be in the bad reputation our politics has earned as a sure destroyer of great careers and individual reputations. The game has become so rotten that anyone who goes in hardly comes out smelling of roses.
Hence we have to settle for septuagenarians as candidates for mayor. This is not an ideal situation and will certainly not lead to the new ideas and innovative ways that this newspaper’s editor says Johannesburg needs.
