Johannesburg explosion represents our national crisis and the imperative for change

The most watched video of the explosion showed a man who was nearly crushed by a minibus taxi that was tossed into the air and nearly fell on him. Enock Michael, from Malawi, was trying to eke out a living like millions of other people in South Africa. Another Malawian street vendor, Joseph Dumisane, was not so lucky. He was crushed to death by a taxi.

Executive Mayor of Johannesburg Kabelo Gwamanda showed up at the scene, but he was hardly noticeable, especially with limelight predator Panyaza Lesufi also there. Even if Lesufi wasn’t there, Gwamanda has neither the confidence nor sagacity for the job of leading any city, let alone Johannesburg.

While the explosion made international news, it was also one more incident in a gradual collapse that has been years in the making, and progressing almost daily. For the six years to the end of 2021, I worked in the Johannesburg CBD. Going there every day is an extreme sport.

In 2018, one of my then employer’s security guards was shot dead in cold blood next to the main entrance in the early afternoon. I watched him die. He was a kid, born in the 1990s and supposedly “born free”. On that day we had journalists from several African countries in the building, and they came out to board their hired bus just as he was taking his last breath. They were understandably shaken.

Failed governance

There is also the abnormal situation of car insurance companies directing traffic at intersections where traffic lights are almost permanently defective, or fixing potholes, lauded by some as some kind of corporate patriotism. It is not. Normal, functioning cities elsewhere do not need insurance companies to fix potholes and direct traffic.

In any event, homeless people direct Johannesburg traffic these days. Some have dirty, torn reflective jackets, but most wing it. Motorists patiently oblige them because they have accepted that their government is absent from the most basic of its functions.