Nah, it's in Durban we trust

Six weeks was all the time I gave Johannesburg to impress me with its might and splendour. And in just six weeks I have decided that one would have to be completely crackers to live anywhere but in Durban. So last night I bid farewell to the sprawling dichotomy of the southern labour camps and the northern secured enclaves and headed home.

Thankfully my years as a wondering student and prophet of liberalism has enabled me to travel with just my trusty backpack and walking stick, although admittedly it is a small stick and I tread quite loudly. Public transport terminals are the centres of my excursions and it is only within these places that I see the intermingling of all of the peoples of our country.

While the airports remain the secure bastions of the privileged traveller; the train, bus and taxi stations are awash with chancer-porters, informal traders and of course gangs of thieves. Avoiding the wrath of the taxi bosses, the thieves and muggers choose to prey upon people in train and bus stations, where they have only to contend with Transnet’s Rent-A-Cops and the SAPS, who pose little danger to any mugger, as compared to the pangas, knobkerries, sjamboks and firearms toted by the taxi bosses.

Security it seems is a critical Johannesburg industry, and while the northern suburbanites live in fear of the southern, eastern and western thugs, they seem to have overlooked the fact that the vast majority of white-collar crime is perpetrated from within the enclaves of the northern suburbs.

Indeed any person who has only ever lived, worked, learnt and played in, on, off and around Rivonia and Oxford Roads, has no real idea about what Johannesburg is all about, and extending this ambit to the Republic Road environs of Randburg, brings little further clarity.

One must visit and immerse oneself with the peoples of the south and the west of Johannesburg — assuming that Ekurhuleni and Tshwane are completely separate cities — in order to understand how Johannesburg is the thing that it is. And then you will see, the leafy, green northern suburbs first giving way to the cold and unforgiving streets of the central Joburg, into which jungle every immigrant is initially cast, before ballooning into the surrounding light industrial areas of old and the densely packed ghettoes of downtown Jozi.

But the real genius of the apartheid planning of Johannesburg was the complete invisibility of the southern labour camps, in fact one has to drive along a freeway past a few mine dumps just to get there. And once you’re there, it’s a whole other world. No more the paved excellence and imported caffeine of Sandton and Rosebank, no more the vast gardens and electric fences of Bryanston and Benmore; just the tightly packed human sardine can which spews forth the labour to keep Johannesburg ticking.

Tick, tick, tick … soon it will explode, like all civil unrest soon the townships will realise that they are working to build and beautify the northern suburbs while their own homes and communities in the south get left behind, soon the people will begin to ask why their only fancy public amenity is a subsidised bus ride to get them to and from work every day.

And though the taxis are more expensive, the reality is that the taxis don’t collect subsidies from the state, do they? But the taxis from Commissioner Street, near Carlton Centre, run 24 hours to and from Soweto and surrounding areas, unlike the busses, taxis and trains.

So if we are looking at the reality of providing world-class hospitality to the people of the world next year during the month of football mania, and ensuring that the privilege and service quality of Sandton and surrounds is maintained, then the thing to do is to ensure that the people who work in these bastions of privilege, the cooks, the waiters, the bartenders, the cleaners, the guides and so on, that they are able to get where they need to be, as and when they need to be there and for as little as possible.

Factually the Rea Vaya system does not serve this purpose, as it doesn’t run 24 hours a day, so it would seem that either the taxis need to be made cheaper or the busses need to extend their service times. In addition the people who actually deserve a fat wage increase are the workers in the hospitality industry, hopefully now that the Cosatu elite have their bansela, they will spend and tip more such that the hospitality workers can be paid more.

On this adventure into Johannesburg, I did not have the privilege of visiting Alexandra, and while that is a priority for the next visit, I hope that I will be able to say that those who benefit from the state’s procurement, and who are from Alexandra, should ensure that Alexandra benefits too. After all it is no secret that our government has been overpaying for everything it has bought since 1994.

And the overwhelming wake-up call for me has been the reality that Johannesburg is a corrupt city, whether it’s people in the private sector paying kickbacks to secure orders for office equipment or people in the public sector being overpaid for political reasons. And this tradition goes back to the foundations of the mining companies and the manner in which the Barnatos and Rhodes of this world obtained their mining rights and stakes. The culture of the robber baron is so entrenched in the psyche of Joburgers that what most God-fearing people would consider unethical, is considered the cost of doing business in Johannesburg.

Perhaps we the people, Abantu AbaKwaZulu need to ask why is it that our people are living, working and believing in Johannesburg when our own Sovereign Kingdom of KwaZulu is being underdeveloped and neglected, when unemployment and investment in eThekwini, Msunduzi and Ulundi trails that of the cities of Gauteng, when Richards Bay is shedding jobs instead of building new plants because of Eskom’s shortages.

One must ask, because after all we the people, Abantu AbaKwaZulu, take our culture wherever we go, which is why we have blood relatives in Swaziland, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique, all descendants of King Senzanzakhona’s father, all IsiZulu people in essence. One wonders thus, if we were to reinstate the Mfcane and to reclaim the rights of the Sovereign Kingdom of KwaZulu, in its most expansive form, with what would South Africa be left?

Not much it seems, and it remains that until the new port in the Eastern Cape is online, that the vast majority of shipping will remain the responsibility of the Kingdom of KwaZulu, so while the Johannesburg market is a major centre of trade, it would stand Joburgers in good stead to remember just who has the power to squeeze and constrain that market at our will.

So I say to one and all, nah, it’s in Durban we trust, masiya phambili sonke

Avishkar Govender
Honourary Consul General
Durban Fretus Society