Dada Morero is many things — former mayor of Johannesburg, current mayor of Johannesburg, leading candidate to become two-time former mayor of Johannesburg — but let us give credit where it’s due: he lasted well over a week before he shot off both of his kneecaps.
Some readers might be confused by this claim, reminding me that Dada had only been in the job for four days when he famously told News24 that nobody should expect anything from him or his team during his tenure. I would argue, though, that this was not a misstep by Dada.
On the contrary, I think it was honest, clear and managed all sorts of expectations. Still wondering whether to start drilling for your own water? Wonder no more! Still unsure about the right time to trade in your car for a mule? Giddy up! Still vague about whether your monthly bill from the city is an insult, a joke or provocation? Well, now you know, sucker.
Yes, after 30 years of the ANC’s relentless lies about what it can deliver, there was a strange relief in seeing a senior cadre tell the people of Johannesburg they shouldn’t hold their breath. Unless, of course, they were walking anywhere near an open sewer or a mountain of trash.
If he’d just continued like that — delivering nothing but a kind of grumbling fatalism, like a hermit survivor of a nuclear war, or a pandemic, or an ANC government, accepting that he didn’t have enough tinned food or ammunition to make it through the winter — he might have been OK. Hell, he might even have been remembered one day as one of the 40 best mayors Joburg has had since 2020.
But then he had to go and have an idea. Worse, he had to have it and then tell someone about it, and now many in Johannesburg are looking back at former mayor Kabelo Gwamanda if not with respect then at least with a kind of grudging recognition. Or, if not that, then perhaps with a mixture of amazement and contempt that is fractionally less intense than — OK, they’re both a train wreck, but you get my point.
Dada’s idea, in case you haven’t heard it yet, was this. Given that Johannesburg is a cosmopolitan city, many of its criminals (and its victims of crime) speak languages South Africans don’t. To tackle this, Dada suggested the Johannesburg metropolitan police department should hire foreign nationals living in the city to serve as police who could act as their own interpreters.
Now, I understand that it can be hard to read the room. Why, just this weekend minister of agriculture and largely disappearing without a trace John Steenhuisen decided the best way to demonstrate the DA’s commitment to excellence and
co-operation within the government of national unity was to appoint as his chief of staff a conservative podcaster and bargain bin edgelord who, to celebrate his new job, has updated his X bio to read “Baas Van Die Plaas”.
But for Dada to suggest that Johannesburg go out of its way to find and hire foreign nationals, in a country in which more than 8-million locally born citizens are unemployed ... well, that was something quite special.
Unsurprisingly, the mayor’s comrades have waddled into action, explaining that it was just a suggestion — a vocal musing, if you will, barely even articulated beyond a faint exhalation and the subtlest movement of the lips — and that it was killed with fire as soon as it fell out of Dada’s mouth and squelched onto the committee room table.
So alarmed has the response been that even Gauteng proconsul Panyaza Lesufi lurched upright on his ottoman and yelled at his four portrait painters to leave the room before hammering out a tweet explaining that naughty Dada “fully accepts the decision not to entertain this proposal further”.
I mean, it’s one thing for the ANC state to create employment for rich foreigners, as it did with the arms deal and the Guptas and Bell Pottinger, but only a fool would ignore the political catastrophe inherent in creating employment for poor foreigners.
Hastily apologising for “the confusion and pain caused by this proposal”, Lesufi reassured the people of Johannesburg that “we remain committed to ensure that our law enforcement agencies are appropriately trained to tackle challenges created by crime”.
Given that Lesufi was the man who dreamed up and oversaw the creation — well, fabrication — of 6,000 “crime wardens” in Gauteng, it’s possible that he thinks “appropriately trained” refers to a process of walking up to people and offering them a uniform, a bottle of pepper spray and immunity from prosecution, or at least the guarantee of prosecution so ham-fisted that it is indistinguishable from immunity.
Still, his panic was clear; which brought back something I’d forgotten, and which gave me the smallest glow of satisfaction: the desperate haste with which everyone in the ANC in Gauteng has fallen over themselves to censure Dada reminded me that despite entrenched cynicism, and compounded failure doubling down on grinding apathy, there are still things that shock our political class into action.
Not poverty, of course, or crime, corruption or crumbling hospitals. But this week it has felt good, even just for a day or two, to see the democratic ideal in action: politicians being scared of voters.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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