It can sometimes be difficult to make sense of life in the ANC’s SA, but last week, when we learnt that Johannesburg’s property portfolio of 30,000 buildings is being managed by people apparently hand-picked for their inability to run anything more complicated than a bath, some of that city’s problems came into slightly sharper focus.
I say slightly, because the picture is already pretty clear. The discovery that the board of the Johannesburg Property Company features a tollgate cashier, a receptionist and a person with no education beyond grade 11 was simply another example of Thabo Mbeki’s deployed chickens coming home to roost, clucking away about socialist revolution and world-class cities while entrenching a system that has placed loyalty and silence far above competence and transparency.
Of course, sometimes they cluck about other things. When the city’s building in Marshalltown burned, killing 77 people, the chickens squawked about NGOs and apartheid. But it was cadre deployment — the ANC’s multi-decade project to sever the inherent link between employment and employability — that killed those people.
To be fair, the blight of cadre deployment, and the inevitable ruin it leaves behind, are not unique to Gauteng. But as we approach the 2024 election it’s worth wondering if there is something unique about Johannesburg, and perhaps Gauteng as a whole, that has wider repercussions for all of us.
When Corruption Watch released its 2022 Analysis of Corruption Trends recently, tallying up reports or complaints involving corruption both in the public and private sector, and breaking them down into all their nasty little shapes and sizes, two facts slithered alarmingly off the page.
The first was that, of all the reports collected by Corruption Watch in the period under review, 43% had come from Gauteng. The next highest figure was the Western Cape, with 8%. The second fact was that 73% of the total number had emanated from just three municipalities: the metros of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni.
Now, there are a number of possible explanations here. The first is that Gautengers are way more honest than everyone else in SA, and are therefore far more likely to blow whistles or drop off hard drives than citizens in other provinces. I live in Cape Town, but all the Gautengers I’ve met seem open and honest, especially about why they’ve moved to Cape Town, so perhaps this is the case.
Another reason might be that Gauteng is what is still rather optimistically referred to as SA’s “economic engine”, and even though ours is less a supercharged V8 than a smoking two-stroke bolted onto the back of a slowly sinking dinghy, history — and an endless line of plausible men in silk suits — have taught us that where there is money, there are people stealing it.
Still, I do wonder if there’s another force contributing to Gauteng’s slow collapse; something far less dramatic than corruption but no less destructive to the province and the country as a whole.
Despite its exploding roads, crumbling buildings and dry water pipes, Gauteng is a magnet, drawing in SA migrants and foreign nationals alike. It is also SA’s most youthful province by a comfortable margin, and yet it has the lowest proportion of children and by far the lowest birth rate in the country — 1.82 compared to the national average of 2.34.
In other words, Gauteng is clearly somewhere twentysomethings want to go, but not somewhere they want to stay, and certainly not somewhere they intend to start families. And this is where I start to wonder about the province’s effect on the rest of the country. Because there’s something else those young, hardworking people in Gauteng are not doing.
They’re not voting. As the province with the fewest children, you’d expect it to have the highest proportion of registered voters. Instead, it has the lowest: just 38.5% of Gautengers registered to vote in the 2021 local government election. Even if you argue that those figures are skewed by Gauteng’s large number of foreign nationals — say, 1-million — you still get a number fractionally above 40%, a remarkably dismal effort compared to Free State (48.7%), Eastern Cape (48.6%), Northern Cape (47.9%) and KwaZulu-Natal (47.6%).
And yet the antipathy to voting seems, at first glance, to go even deeper. Of the 40%-ish of Gautengers who registered to vote in 2021, just fewer than 44% showed up, the third-worst turnout after Mpumalanga and North West.
In short: the province with the most eligible voters, and saddled with what is probably the country’s worst corruption pandemic, is the least committed to bringing about a change in the political — and therefore criminal — status quo in the country as a whole.
Again, there are probably logical reasons for this. Young people are abandoning electoral politics in SA, having presumably seen nothing to like. I also imagine that if I were 25 and leaving Cape Town to go and make my pile in Johannesburg, with vague plans to return home in a few years and perhaps start a family and grow old, I’m not sure I’d care who was running the city, or how, or what it would look like in 30 years.
It’s really difficult to make people care about a place that doesn’t care about them. But next year Gauteng will make all of us care about it, whether we want to or not.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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