OPINION: Joburg cleaned up for the G20, so why not for its own people?

Towards the end of November it will be exactly one year since Johannesburg, sort of, lived up to a marketing cliché that seems to have been dispensed with – “A World Class African City.”

As Hot FM reported on Friday morning, the City of Gold “managed to put on a much cleaner face for the world’s leaders during the G20 summit. So why can’t it do the same for the people who live here?”

One year on from the G20’s much-vaunted Johannesburg summit — complete with blue-light cavalcades and road-access disruption amid hastily repaired potholes — the city is back to its messy old self.

This is especially the case because of poor refuse collection related to a protest by members of the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) over wages, with rubbish piling up all over, TimesLIVE reported.

Samwu members blocked the M1 freeway at Smit Street in Braamfontein on Monday, accusing the City of reneging on a long-standing agreement to align their pay with the level of work they perform, and saying they are paid at grade 8 while carrying out grade 10 duties. The union says it did not strike but was waiting for mayor Dada Morero to address it, and that members returned to work on Tuesday.

In the meantime the rubbish and rats are getting worse, and we’re days away from the local government elections on 4 November.

According to EWN, 16 Samwu members arrested during the protest were released on warning by the Johannesburg Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday and face charges including inciting public violence and contravening the National Road Traffic Act.

Pikitup has blamed the protest for a growing backlog, and its spokesperson, Anthony Selepe, could not say when services would return to normal. He said the problem lay with the City rather than the entity, Sowetan reported.

Samwu’s deputy regional secretary, Richard Moila, called it an exaggeration to say services had been disrupted by the protest. Pikitup also cited fleet breakdowns and long distances to an outlying landfill for a three-day backlog in the Roodepoort depot area. Deputy mayor Loyiso Masuku apologised to residents and said an interim arrangement was in place to clear the backlog.

This blame-game ballyhoo gets an extra political stink if you consider what President Cyril Ramaphosa told G20 delegates: “In order to get Johannesburg to go up the ladder, we do need everyone’s hands on deck. We do need officials whose job it’s going to be on a daily basis to do the work that needs to be done.”

Tarry Penny reports for Hot FM that, “in the run up to the G20 some parts of Johannesburg looked very different.

“Streets were cleaned, public spaces were spruced up and the city appeared determined to make a good impression on its international visitors.”

Tebogo Mashilompane of Forum for SA told the radio station: “The city was beautiful, very clean. If they were able to do it for the world, why can’t they do it for us? Are we asking too much?”

Penny reports “it’s a question that goes to the heart of Johannesburg’s service delivery crisis, because the G20 preparations showed us that targeted improvements can happen when they’re treated as urgent.”

So are the people of Johannesburg not important enough for the current coalition government consisting of the ANC, ActionSA, EFF, PA, IFP, Al Jama-ah and the AIC? Wayne Duvenage of the Organisation for Undoing Tax Abuse believes the difference ultimately comes down to leadership.

“The biggest sin is that the municipal manager, the politicians that have got the extractive networks are happily looking away. And when you show them the obvious wrong, and they do nothing, they are complicit.”

“They are the problem. So it’s a leadership issue. Nothing more than that.”