Who really cares about Jozi?

Scarred by excavations, potholes, litter and overgrown vegetation, many Johannesburg roads mock the idea of a caring city. Who cares?

A decade ago, Joburg was hailed as leading the “Caring Cities Initiative” launched by an international organisation called the Metropolis Network. Almost as pretentious as the misnomer, “World-Class African City.” Fancy words betrayed daily. Care is missing.

Of course, many of us care deeply about Joburg but the dominant culture, from the highest levels, couldn’t care less. Care is limited to a narrow focus.

We councillors may be guilty of this when we divert queries by saying: “It’s not in my ward.” Similarly, different city entities such as Joburg Water and Joburg Roads Agency (JRA) frequently take a blinkered view, sticking to their lanes. Passing the buck is a Joburg habit.

Even within the entities, the different sections shy away from reaching across internal boundaries. I was reminded of this over the weekend when Joburg Water belatedly arrived to install a new sewer connection for our property.

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As the main sewer line runs along the other side, workers had to dig a deep trench across the road in order to connect the pipes. This pattern is supposed to follow: soil is backfilled into the hole and tamped down. After about a week, when soil has settled, reinstatement is completed with an asphalt surface.

In recent years, the time taken for reinstatements has expanded. For example, we are still waiting for JRA to provide an asphalt surface after Joburg Water dug up the corner of Buckingham and Clarence avenues in Craighall Park last August.

Endlessly pursuing such reinstatements is part of Joburg ward councillors’ Sisyphean load. On Sunday, I politely asked the onsite Joburg Water team leader about the prospects of our paved driveway surface being reinstated within reasonable time.

His response: “My job ends here”, pointing to backfilled soil being smoothed over. A different JW team would re-lay the broken paving stones and yet another JW team would remove the huge pile of soil and hacked vegetation dumped on pavement on the other side of the road.

JRA would reinstate the road surface. Groan. There is no overarching, one-stop service pulling all this together Who cares? Seemingly not this team, or the next. I don’t blame the guys onsite. The culture of pulling apart rather than together – “not my job” – comes from the top.

This team leader led from front, doing more of the work than the rest, but he couldn’t budge from his lane. The origins of this pulling apart, rather than together, were pinpointed in a The Citizen piece on Monday: “Why Joburg’s roads are in chaos.”

The creation of independently operating city-owned entities such as JRA, Joburg Water and City Power spawned a culture of separateness, symbolised by the incompatibility of various logging and tracking systems.

Workers and middle managers, even if they care much about the city, have difficulty stretching across the divides in order to get things done better. Fractured coalitions, with MMCs sniping at each other, add to the turmoil.

To fix this culture we need political change and inspirational leadership. Like Cape Town.

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