The instinctive appeal of vigilante leadership
This week, in the latest iteration of the mayoral chain relay in the City of Johannesburg, Kenny Kunene got the chance to act as mayor. The present mayor — whose mission is to match the record of the previous one and last long enough for ratepayers to know his name — was out of the city.
Kunene, whose evolution in public discourse is well known, immediately acted on one of the key areas of focus that his party — the Patriotic Alliance (PA) — has been most outspoken about. In its 2020 manifesto, the PA defined itself as a “party with a conscience and a champion of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society”.
In its key policies, it expresses a deep commitment to decent housing and sanitation. While it acknowledges that housing remains the responsibility of the state, the PA committed to ensuring that when families are relocated for the purposes of home upgrades, their temporary homes will not be characterised by disrespectful conditions.
When it comes to the Johannesburg inner city, the decay of the city’s buildings and the hijacking by rogue elements has become a health, housing and security crisis.
As landlords abandon properties and “property barons” move in and insert themselves as rent collectors, the poor and vulnerable citizens who occupy those spaces and have nowhere else to live find themselves at the mercy of the mafia.
Lack of proper facilities and proximity to drug dens amplifies the vulnerabilities of these citizens. Finding solutions to the crisis has proved elusive for administrations over the years.
At the heart of the problem is the need to distinguish between the vulnerability of those who would otherwise be homeless, and the criminality of those who have turned it all into a lucrative trade in human unsettlement. There is also the need to secure temporary and alternative facilities for affected citizens if existing structures are demolished or renovated.
The commitment to socioeconomic rights as promised in the constitution, and the ability to afford the process, have been fatal enough for various city administrations to essentially give up on the process. As a result, while everyone looks on in horror at the subhumane conditions of the inner city, the question of how to resolve it remains unresolved.
Beneath the veneer of the problem lies the generally poor vigilance of elected leaders in identifying problems before they escalate into crisis. The ability of a block of flats in Hillbrow and an estate in Dainfern to rack up millions in unpaid electricity bills and yet remain connected indicates a lack of vigilance on the part of the administrators responsible for the process.
The accumulation of unpaid water bills in Soweto, and Eskom arrears by a city such as Tshwane, suggests a breakdown of the systems that should keep the government functional. When all these failures manifest, the idea of vigilante leadership becomes instinctively attractive.
This week, Kunene’s great mission was to clean up the inner city through raids on problematic buildings. These range from those regarded as criminal hot spots, hijacked buildings and those that are so fragile they are obvious health hazards. Kunene’s raids ranged from verbal commitments to bring the city back to its glory days through evictions, to directing a bulldozer to raze a building.
These actions seemed to be initiated outside existing law, which seeks to find a balance between the preservation of human settlements, city security and protecting the poor and vulnerable citizens mentioned in the PA manifesto. That criminals exist does not immediately translate to every occupant in the building being a criminal.
The inability to use law enforcement to distinguish between vulnerability and criminality meant Kunene’s vigilante leadership approach looked attractive. Regrettably, it is untenable. The real problem
— ensuring proper observance of the law — is what we must always seek to address.