Donald Trump is right: London’s Sadiq Khan is the worst mayor in the world, possibly since records of bad mayors began. In fact, you might have to venture back to the Middle Ages to some village in the Balkans to find a worse custodian − a bossman, perhaps, from an uncontacted Papua New Guinean tribe who makes soap from naughty children and practises snuff prima nocta.
Expanding your horizons somewhat, you’d probably end up at a photo finish between Khan and Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz.
Khan is prickly, when attacked for being rubbish. He claims that he’s criticised because he’s Muslim. Not true. It’s because he’s short. Working in a game reserve as a teenager, I encountered a wise Shangaan witchdoctor from Justicia near Bushbuckridge. “Never accept advice from a miniature person,” he warned me sternly.
Which is why paranoia rockets whenever Geordin Hill-Lewis announces that he’s hooked up with Khan again for what culminated in “productive discussions”. It is said that miniature people are very good at manipulating bearish ones, and I fear that the net result of these little encounters will be late night WhatsApps sent from London to Cape Town: “Hiya Geord, have got some ideas on how to really piss off your middle-class lot with some tax and climate platitudes. My assistant Gulnaz will send over the file tomorrow.”
Disregarding his relationship with Khan, Hill-Lewis is a good mayor, who has managed to further enhance a platform established by previously good mayors. And none of those mayors was better than Helen Zille, who, if she was nothing else, would almost be a laboratory experiment entitled ‘making a good mayor’.
But there is something deeper than the prospect of Johannesburg as a habitable, functioning environment once again. Zille is a feature of a second-chance condition that is apparent across the world, where merit, character, self-control and sacrifice are emerging again as our addiction to DEI, wasting cash, liberal boomers failing to invest in infrastructure, sounding nice and being useless or parachuting criminals into civic leadership is brought to an end.
Diseased
Just last week an interview between Zille and 947’s Anele Mdoda illustrated how diseased we’ve been and to some extent still are. Had this conversation occurred in 2020’s great racism moral panic, Mdoda’s ultimate position − try as she might to conceal it − that the DA is racist would have probably been explicit. With that scam exposed, Mdoda was resigned to whining off each sentence − as if Zille not accepting something she evidently is not is…disappointing.
But Zille didn’t give Mdoda an inch − why should she? − and emerged as determined and objective, with the constructively channeled fury of a scammed ratepayer and importantly, someone who deeply cares about the city, feels personally aggrieved at the rampant degeneracy across its leadership. As she should: she made her career there, and isn’t alone at being angered by the apparent hellscape formed by incompetence, criminality and neglect.
The vast majority of responses were telling − and an accelerated validation of Zille’s candidacy. Mdoda’s position − of not necessarily wanting to burn everything down but if that just so happens, it will be important to remember that it was represented accordingly − is no longer relevant or desired.
Further good news for Zille is that she isn’t alone in having to drag expertise back into the mainstream. Across the US the movement is in full flight, Latin America and parts of Eastern Europe too. Even in left-leaning administrations, such as Denmark, the idea that liberal mayors should and must first resist the creep toward nationalism by projecting ‘values’ is being muted. Delivery, value-for-money, skills and hard work are making a comeback.
New Zealand is a case study here. We will never be informed about the full extent of Jacinda Ardern’s disastrous administration − in which her lockdown policies were among the milder indiscretions − because prestige journalists and centrist dad podcasters don’t like being contradicted, especially by the truth. Upon her resignation, we were issued with the equivalent of a suspicious doctor’s note: that she had run out of puff. Something was horribly wrong.
Wildest ideas
What her successor, a former boss of the national carrier, inherited has likewise not enjoyed the prominence of his predecessor’s wildest ideas, including a ‘wellness budget’, introduced in 2019 that cost massively and failed equally. Christopher Luxon is an enthusiastic, well-meaning guy who sits literally one centimetre to the right, but his frustration at the state of his economy − a mess made by a mess − is increasingly difficult to conceal.
In 2018, Jacinda Ardern visited London, along with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They were welcomed by Sadiq Khan, and the three visited an inner-city ghetto school, where Ardern explained to a group of children how horrified she was by a turtle being found with a plastic straw in its nose. One of the school children interrupted to say that he − oddly enough − had also walked in on his father putting a plastic straw in his nose and the cameras stopped rolling momentarily. Sadiq Khan then changed the subject, turning to reporters. “These are the great feminists of the world today,” the mayor said, putting his arm around Ardern, but especially around Trudeau.
“Feminism” can’t make a municipality function without waste or corruption, or ensure safer, cleaner streets, or rid a body of its parasites. Helen Zille might just be able to.
[Image: Yusuf Mansoor on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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