Inner City Regional Office

CITICHAT 13/2002 - 5 April 2002


Inner City Regional Office

Another Bureaucracy or a much needed thrust?

Yakoob M Makda, JP, is the Regional Director of the Johannesburg Central Region. The Central Region (otherwise known as Region 8) is basically the area that I always refer to as the ‘Inner City’ stretching from Pageview/Fordsburg in the west to Judith’s Paarl in the East and from the M2 in the South to the other side of the Braamfontein ridge in the North. Although his higher education was in electrical engineering back in 1977, he was a Member of Parliament from 1989 to 1993 and Chief Whip in the House of Delegates then Deputy minister 1993/94 – firstly of Local Government and later of Housing and Welfare. From 1995 to 2000 he was a Johannesburg Councillor serving at Executive level and from last year the Regional Director of the Central region. A man of great political understanding balanced with practical education and business experience.

On Tuesday, at the monthly Inner City Committee, attended by representatives of business, community, labour, councillors and council officials, Yakoob Makda revealed his plan for the Council’s Inner City Regeneration Programme, consisting of a short term “Jozi Upgrade Task Force” which will operate over the next eighteen months within the longer term – thirty six months - “Jozi Upgrade Programme”.

The Regeneration Programme was adopted by Council in December last year and flows from the Executive Mayor’s recognition of the Inner City as one of the priorities during his term of office. Driving the Programme will be a Regional Manager (interviews currently underway) who will report to Mr Makda and who will co-ordinate the following; Unsafe Buildings Demolition Programme; the Better Buildings Programme; the Precinct Upgrade Programme; the Informal Trading Markets Programme; Taxi Ranks Programme and Peripheral Regeneration Programme. The first five programmes work from the centre towards the periphery and the last from the edges of the region, inwards. These are not new programmes, but in truth, have desperately needed co-ordination and direction. The programmes will be supported by four units, those of Law Enforcement, Building Control/Land Use; Environmental Clean Up and Infrastructure.

OK, what have we here? The creation of a new bureaucracy or a genuine attempt to come to grips on a practical basis with the issues that negatively impact on the daily lives of city users. Certainly there is some of the former present but the saving grace could be that Yakoob Makda is actually stepping into what I have perceived to be a major problem, the vacuum created by the closure of the Inner City Office last year. The background is a long and complex one, but when was anything associated with the inner city of Johannesburg not?

The past seven years has seen the Council changing both its structure and personality as it has come to grips with democratic local government for the first time in the country’s history. Prior to 1995, Johannesburg was a city-wide municipality in direct competition with numerous other smaller, less wealthy municipalities and large disadvantaged areas that surrounded it. My perception of Council in the years just prior to this time was one of self-enforced political paralysis. We had a non-representative group of mostly white councillors elected by white ratepayers and a bureaucracy staffed predominantly by white officials. The white politicians were very aware of the massive impending changes, and, my own perception again, seemed to take the attitude of doing as little as possible in the Inner City so as not to upset the ‘new’ electorate. The city suffered. The changes brought about following the 1995 elections were prodigious. Brand new councillors started dismantling the local authority apartheid structures and implementing new. The new proved to be an interim approach but included absorbing the peripheral independent councils and disadvantaged areas into a Metropolitan structure which was then gerrymandered into four interim sub-structures each with their own council under a Metropolitan authority - but the inner city remained neglected. In fact three of the four sub-structures trisected the inner city making accountability, service delivery and communication non-existent – despite protestations to the contrary! In 1996 the business sector convinced the authorities to undertake an exercise which brought business, community, local and provincial government around a table to craft a vision for the inner city. (Because of the historic suspicions and mistrust between sectors, four independent sectoral visions were first developed, we never do things by halves!) When the final vision emerged in 1997, .the question in business’ mind related to who or what would be responsible for implementing action to achieve the vision and monitoring progress along the way. Business recommended that a focused unit be established within Council to develop the necessary implementation policies/strategies and also to co-ordinate the disparate efforts of the sub-councils. This resulted in the establishment of the Inner City Office under the direction of an Inner City Manager. Major responsibilities were the development of strategies that would lead to the achievement of the vision, associated policy formulation, resultant project implementation and service delivery co-ordination. An Inner City Committee was established to monitor progress.

Whilst the Inner City Office proved to be highly successful in its work, the interim structure of four Metropolitan sub-councils was disastrous. In 2000 new elections were held on the basis of a ‘unicity’ model, Metropolitan boundaries were extended but the whole caboodle now fell under one Metro Council and an Executive Mayor. The area covered by the Metro was huge, some 2 300 square kilometres which makes it physical size-wise equivalent to Los Angeles and larger than Sydney, New York or even London! The planners considered the area too large for efficient service delivery and so it was again sub-divided into some 11 ‘regions’ - this time the sub-division wasn’t to accommodate political needs but practical considerations. The Inner City, as delineated through the visioning process, became one of these regions, Region 8. Apart from co-ordinating and ensuring that they receive services via various service agencies, the Regions would each be responsible for Social Services; Libraries; Health; Sport and Recreation and Housing. The all important functions of Policy, Planning, Finance, Project Implementation, etc would be centralised. The Inner City Office in this new scenario would largely become superfluous.

Business now became concerned that the impetus that had been built up in the inner city would falter without the Inner City Office leadership as the stage had been reached where project implementation was the immediate need. The projects identified and ready for implementation would now stand in line with projects throughout the Metro. Business therefore supported a move to convert the Inner City Office into a development agency whose initial focus would be project implementation in the inner city area but ultimately would function over the whole metro area on a broader basis than just implementation.. So the Johannesburg Development Agency came into being.

In practice, the disappearance of the Inner City Office as the focal point for all issues of inner city regeneration, set our efforts back. Whilst the JDA took over the project implementation responsibility, which has therefore continued to be driven effectively, and the Region took over service delivery oversight, the other functions of the Inner City Office were absorbed back into the normal departmental functions of the Metro and disappeared into the bureaucratic pit. In my opinion, during the past six months we actually lost some of the ground we had built up over the past few years.

So, whilst some might see Yakoob Makda’s initiative as just another bureaucracy, I don’t believe that it has to be that - it is critical for the achievement of our goals and setting the foundations for Joburg 2030.– a great deal will now depend on the support he gets within Council. Certainly, he will have the Business sector’s support. The ‘size’ of one of his problems was highlighted in this snippet entitled “dirty old town”in the Economist earlier this year!

“Efforts to spruce up the central business district of downtown Johannesburg haven’t produced many results, at least according to one newspaper’s survey. Although the Council – and Pikitup, a company hired to clear the grime – spends 48 million rand a year picking up rubbish in the inner city, the area has been named the dirtiest of all the business districts in Gauteng province by South Africa’s Sunday Times. Sandton, the far flashier business district in northern Johannesburg, where the stock exchange and many big companies have offices, was picked as the most sparkling. That was, perhaps, because nobody walks there and few hawkers ply a trade, whereas downtown Jo’burg remains far more popular than sterile Sandton – at least for litter bugs. Combine all the districts around Johannesburg, such as downtown Sandton, Germiston, Boksburg, Kempton Park, and over 550 tonnes of refuse and litter are scooped up each day. Phew.”

In typical inaccurate media fashion, Germiston, Boksburg and Kempton Park are not even in the Joburg Metro, but the facts provided by the City’s web page (why do we advertise such issues coupled with such useful information that our altitude at 2000 metres means that the air is thinner and eggs take an extra minute to boil?????) is that the city collects 1 416 500 tons of garbage each year of which 244 200 is in the form of illegal dumping. Phew. Good luck, Yakoob.

Regards, neil