GHALEB CACHALIA | Bogotá offers lessons for Johannesburg

Bogotá was once a byword for crime, corruption and collapsed public trust, worse than anything Johannesburg claims today. Then, across three mayoral terms in the 1990s, two quite different men — Antanas Mockus, a philosopher who taught civic behaviour before he taught policy, and Enrique Peñalosa, an engineer obsessed with public space — built a city that worked and worked for everyone.

Buses, parks, schools and libraries went first to the poorest barrios, not the richest. Neither man ran on ideology. Both ran on delivery, backed by an unglamorous discipline. They collected taxes, spent them visibly, and measured the results.

Bogotá proves the thing Johannesburg’s voters keep being asked to take on faith — that competence and fairness aren’t opposing choices. They can be the same administration. The question for Johannesburg is whether any of the candidates on offer are capable of that discipline or simply the accompanying rhetoric.

Johannesburg is South Africa’s most diagnosed failure. Nobody needs another diagnosis. Every election, the prescription is the same — fix service delivery, root out corruption, repair infrastructure, and restore governance.

The ANC now recites it. So do the DA, ActionSA, and the EFF. Everyone knows the disease. Which means the diagnosis is now worthless as a filter. The question isn’t what’s broken. It’s who can fix it and what will stop them.

The ANC is running against its own record. It can’t even name a mayoral candidate — the clearest possible sign of a party that has lost the plot in the city it once owned outright. For the first time since 1994, it looks like a spectator, not the incumbent.

The MK Party is noise, not a governing plan. It’s a tribal trough in search of feed. The EFF is the only party with a real ideology. But ideology doesn’t fix a burst water main. It has never run a metro, nor has it ever proven that it can manage procurement without helping itself first.

That leaves two people with actual track records — Helen Zille and Herman Mashaba. Neither is a clean pick. Zille’s Cape Town was efficient — for whoever was already being served. Informal settlements stayed at the back of the queue for two decades. Competence without equity isn’t the win it looks like.

Mashaba knows Johannesburg and moves fast. But his line on immigrants isn’t separate from his theory of government. It’s a preview of who he thinks counts as a resident worth serving.

So here’s the real split. Ideology and administrative capability are not the same axis. The EFF has the first, not the second. The DA and ActionSA have the second, and a thin or ugly version of the first. Cape Town proves competence alone doesn’t deliver fairness.

Maybe ideology was never Johannesburg’s bottleneck. The question is whether anyone in charge will spend money on Alexandra and Diepsloot instead of just protecting what already works in Sandton.

And here’s what no campaign poster admits — whoever wins, wins into a coalition. Outright majorities are over. The coalition partner may matter more than the mayor. A reformer chained to a transactional partner delivers the same rot in new packaging.

So judge on evidence, not slogans. Who has actually run something? Who’s offering measurable commitments instead of comforting adjectives? Who can hold a coalition together? Who has named Alexandra, Orange Farm, Diepsloot, Soweto — not just Sandton?

None of it produces a perfect answer, because Johannesburg’s politics aren’t perfect either. But it replaces faith with evidence. And that might be the best this city gets — not a saviour, but an administration that makes competence the story again, instead of ideology.

Be wary of those who broadcast their colours without wearing them. History remembers what you did, not what you thought.

• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister and chaired De Beers Namibia