Many families have them, the embarrassing, dithering uncle at family functions. The delusional uncle who thinks he knows everything and is always dispensing useless advice. Well, as South Africa, we too have such an uncle, Uncle Cyril Ramaphosa.
His doddering was in full display on November 30, when he addressed the nation post the G20 leader’s summit. Just like road signs that warn motorists that they are in a high crime zone, while government does nothing about it, Ramaphosa told the nation that Johannesburg “showed what can be done when a concerted and co-ordinated effort is made to fix potholes and streetlights, to clean up our streets and maintain our infrastructure”. The truth is that the potholes and streetlights were fixed only in certain areas to display a façade of a well-managed city to impress G20 leaders.
Residents saw that only certain areas got fixed, and that other “less exposed” spaces continued to be ignored. To make matters worse, the areas that were “fixed” appear to have already broken again. In trying to make the city better for visitors, the City of Johannesburg has spent more than it should because it didn’t do the job properly to start with, leaving residents in the same place that we were originally.
Read Full Article on The Witness
[paywall]
Why do we need an international meeting to get the City to fix potholes and repair traffic lights? The question remains: Why weren’t the improvements and repairs done all along? I fear that, just like the Fifa World Cup in 2010, now that the G20 Summit is done and dusted, what has been fixed will be left unattended, and where nothing was fixed, it will be left to continue to deteriorate.
Uncle president’s speech was thus basically a bunch of gobbledygook where he claimed the G20 was the “people’s G20”. If this was indeed the case, then the initial beautifying and fixing of the city would continue and not be left to dilapidate.
[/paywall]
