The late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela will be memorialised once more in Johannesburg, with Willian Nicol Drive to be renamed in her honour. This comes at a time when the city is appealing to the private sector to assist it with filling the potholes that bedeck its road infrastructure – some 50 000 of them apparently.
This has been on the cards for some time, and Johannesburg mayor Geoff Makhubo gave a cryptic rendering of the fierce contestation and utter unanimity that the move embodied: ‘Of course, there are people who are against it but the entirety of society agreed the road should be renamed.’
If you don’t understand this, don’t worry; neither do I. Nor, I suspect, does the honourable Mayor. But no worry, shiny new road signs are just the business for those quality-of-life issues that municipal governments are there to manage. If you don’t believe me, I offer you the sage observations of no less a doyenne of the developmental agenda than the minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (and lockdown Mandarin), Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
In March, Mbizana Local Municipality was renamed Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Local Municipality. This, the minister’s office said, was ‘an important step towards ensuring that the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela municipality serves communities with care and responds to their concerns timorously (sic) and rapidly.’ More than this: ‘At the heart of the renaming of this municipality is a resolve to serve communities better, bearing in mind that Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela served people selflessly and wholeheartedly, moreover she was a champion of the poor. Therefore, the renaming pays homage to her ideals and values.’
If you say so. Certainly, there is a pattern here. Perhaps the invocation of the late Ms Madikizela-Mandela’s name has some arcane power to foster development, competent administration and all the rest. (Whether in deputy-ministerial office, or as head of her party’s Women’s League, she embodied this is a somewhat different matter. It would be, uh, debateable.)
So, all eyes will be on the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Local Municipality to gauge the impact of its name change. Good Governance Africa’s 2019 study on local governance put the municipality among the 10 worst-performing in the country. An opinion survey by GGA had the charming assessment: ‘Overall, residents saw the municipality and local government as overwhelmingly corrupt and ineffective.’
So, will the name-change be the mojo it needs?
Fiddling with nomenclature
We’ll wait and see. But it seems that many of the commentators on the municipality’s Facebook page had their doubts, complaining as they did about the state of roads, water and sanitation. Fiddling with nomenclature was, one respondent grumbled, ‘the only thing the ANC is good at’. Though maybe the name-change magic will change their minds.
Nevertheless, if this works, we might look at rolling out the Winnie principle nationally.
At least there is no dispute that local government is particularly afflicted by dysfunctionality. This has been years in the making, going all the way back to before the current dispensation was introduced. The first extended policy analysis I did in my career was on financing local government, and that was in 1997. Last year, the Auditor-General put out a report on the financial state of South Africa’s municipalities under the theme ‘Not much to go around, yet not the right hands at the till’. Oh dear, oh dear, oh deary dear… I can’t be the only person to note that changing ‘at’ to ‘in’ gives the sentence a particular pungency.
Actually, reality being what it is, I’m not. In Business Day, Linda Ensor misquoted this phrase in a report on some comments made by deputy finance minister David Masondo. She remarked that the A-G had found that there was a dearth of ‘the right hands in the till’. Actually, the right hands will not be in the till. Maybe renaming will deal with this.
Masondo himself bewailed the state of local governance. That’s nice. For him the issue is political leadership. We need strong politicos to handle the governance of South Africa’s towns and cities. ‘There is a strong correlation between strong political leadership and the stability of a local government sphere or a municipality’s developmental outcomes. Where you have political instability, the audit outcomes are very poor. The key challenge for us is to sort out the issue of politics. This will go a long way in sorting out the challenges insofar as our local government is concerned.’
So if we have the correct strongman with his hands in the till (sorry folks, at the till, at the till…) we can get things working. It’s not clear whether he also subscribes to the imperative of renaming things after Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, but this can be ironed out in a committee that the president can no doubt be persuaded to convene to ruminate on the matter.
Passive-voice reasoning
The president, meanwhile, spent some time at the Zondo commission chewing over the intricacies of cadre deployment. Ja-well-no-fine-sorta-style. In a wonderful homage to passive-voice reasoning – things happened, they were done, mistakes were made – we learned that actually not only is cadre deployment a common and respected practice, but that it is indispensable for reaching the sunlit uplands that are South Africa’s future. And when we start doing the new-form cadre deployment, we’ll blow your socks off. It will be the cadre deployment that will make cadre deployment great again.
Well, now. Far be it from me to question our esteemed president, but it rather seems to me that whatever good cadre deployment may have been able to do (and there is precious little of this in evidence), the damage it has done has been far weightier. This may indicate that a change of course is in order.
Perhaps some renaming too?
Seldom ones to miss an opportunity to complicate the obvious, some of our commentators swooped in to pronounce that the President had really just made a move in his game of 4D chess. ‘Ramaphosa the “party man” may still pack a reform, or two,’ declared Stephen Grootes in the Daily Maverick. Okay. I’ll concede that Grootes is a bigger name in journalism than mine, and he probably gets more invites to swish in-crowd events (at any rate, I’m sure he did before the great plague befell us, and we had to Skype our dinner parties), but I can’t help thinking there is a tsunami of naïve optimism over this.
But then, who are we going to believe – the president or our own lying eyes?
Well, whatever. But keep an eye on the president. His performance was emblematic of governance in South Africa. A performative mess of head-shaking, hand-wringing and obfuscation. Ag man, we’re sorta sorry that, you know, that this went down. One of those things, you understand. Not enough to prompt any introspection, let alone reform (sorry, renewal), but enough to qualify for a second-hand moral consolation prize.
Transitory satisfaction
No less is this at play with renaming. Renaming in and of itself is no bad thing; generation after generation chooses whom to venerate. And there is the practical benefit of according names to what was hitherto unnamed (the ANC in the Free State, in a rare moment of clarity, pointed to this). But that really is all there is to it. Renaming renames. It offers nothing but the transitory satisfaction of political vindication – and when it is bolted onto decline, even the latter is hard to take seriously. This is the politics of the empty gesture.
As one participant on the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Local Municipality’s Facebook discussion put it: ‘We welcome this change with warm hands…let’s hope that this will be accompanied by a lot of developments going forward.’
Personally, I wouldn’t put money on it, certainly not the money that the City of Johannesburg does not have to fix those potholes.
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Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay