The gogo effect is an amazing thing. Take a dysfunctional city and the sharpest septuagenarian street fighter, chuck in some social media and voilà, potholes are fixed and flooded streets are drained.
You have to give Helen Zille credit, she’s chugging Zamaleks with the faithful in shebeens, having a swim in the middle of the road of a northern suburb and boating down a flooded road in Soweto.
She’s scaring the ostensible leadership of this sclerotic, deeply corrupt and wasteful administration in ways that no-one else has been able to so far.
The problem, perhaps, is there isn’t enough time or enough skaam to get everything fixed.
Zille can continue to cleverly embarrass the conveyor-belt procession of mayors and their MMCs, but will she be able to galvanise enough residents to register to vote and then vote when the local government elections are held at the end of this year?
And if she does get it fixed, can it stay fixed? We saw last year in a flurry of directed energy before the G20 summit how roads and lights could be fixed in Sandton before the world’s great and good descended for their weekend party.
If you drive Winnie Mandela Drive today, though, it feels like everything’s reverted to the new normal.
At night, half the streetlights aren’t on, while many of the intersections either have robots that are out or flashing red intermittently, so taxis, as always, use the ones that are working as suggestions rather than injunctions.
It’s been said before, but if the mayor wanted to balance his budget, all he would have to do would be to order a Johannesburg Metro Police department blitz for a couple of weekends.
The fines would outweigh any discount for cool drinks and we’d all start driving better.
Who knows, there might even be enough money to power our streetlights at night and fix the water reticulation system that is losing almost half of the water the city tries to pump to households, those that still pay for it, that is.
It’s a dream, perhaps not as lofty as Martin Luther King Jnr’s, but a dream nonetheless, even if it does seem more of a fantasy.
So, what can we expect from gogo next? She’s swum and rowed. Is she going to pull a waste recycler’s trolley in the dark up Winnie Mandela Drive?
We can’t wait to find out.
