Well, that was the 2025 political year, that was. I won’t miss it, and neither should any of us. It was a year in which SA’s accretion of bad habits reached their zenith.
And the worst one of these bad habits — establishing a commission, launching “an operation”, or putting together a “task team” to solve a problem — is one I want to see the back of permanently. It’s holding us back from building an excellent nation. Nothing illustrates this more than actions in Africa’s greatest city, Johannesburg, in the run-up to the G20 leaders’ summit in November.
Days before the conference of world leaders, the City of Johannesburg ran a three-day “CEO-City Clean-Up Campaign” which saw government chiefs, business leaders, civil society and local communities go out to spruce up their neighbourhoods. I am writing these words just 20 days after the summit, looking out on Zoo Lake in Parkview, and there are piles of rubbish throughout the park. Potholes and abandoned roadworks have returned on major and minor arteries such as Oxford Road (which was used by presidents just three weeks ago).
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The “clean-up campaign” made Joburg look nice for all of a second, but it has not solved the city’s problems. The fact that he needed a “bomb squad” to do what numerous other mayors across the globe do routinely (does the mayor of Kigali or Cape Town or Tokyo have a “special task team” to help him fix potholes and clean the city?) as part of their responsibilities tells you everything you need to know about how bad things are in Joburg. The man cannot do his job.
SA has 1.3-million relatively well-paid public servants. SA teachers, for example, earn nearly 50% more than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average, and our civil servants are better paid than the median SA taxpayer.
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