It’s very important to get the small things right first before tackling the big issues

THE JOKES on social media flew thick and fast when it emerged that Donald Trump – against all odds – would be America’s 45th president. Apart from tearing pollsters a new one, people joked about how Canada’s population would grow (rapidly), Trump’s hair (what is that, exactly?) and the fact that this is probably the first time in US history that a billionaire is reduced to living in a house paid for by the state.

My favourite, however, was the quip that we should all be buying shares in companies that make bricks, and cement, and those that mine quarries.

That one led a colleague to suggest that the US should actually just be totally walled off. Because that’s what it seems like Trump wants to do with US Inc. He’s promised to create jobs, and grow the economy.

And what’s the bet that a huge amount of trade protectionism is going to be central to his nationalisation plans?

This seems to be the flavour of the day. That is, after all, why Britain pulled up its drawbridges and voted to leave the EU, effectively trying to prove that a country can be an island on its own.

There are very serious consequences to what looks like a new world order. There are consequences for global trade, there are consequences for emerging markets, and there are consequences for freedom of movement.

The US, a country founded thanks to immigrants, I suspect, will no longer be a powerhouse. Granted, much of its power has been obliterated over the past few years, yet we all still catch a cold when it sneezes.

Britain will also slowly turn in on itself; a rainy little island that eschews international contact.

Creating jobs

I do, however, wish Trump well. It’s not easy taking over the helm of a government. Even if he does think he can run it like a business.

Government is not a business. It should not seek to emulate that. It should, so the analysts say, seek rather to enable business and let it get on with its job of making money, boosting the economy and creating jobs.

This is, I imagine, something that the DA mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba, is learning the hard way.

Sure, he’s come in and found rot all over the show. And he’s trying to clean it up. He has announced a corruption task team to investigate all the nonsense that apparently has plagued the city for yonks.

This is important stuff. Corruption takes money away from taxpayers. It weakens service delivery. It destroys lives. It really is awful.

And yet, I’m not sure how many Joburg residents actually care about that.

It’s a bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: we need jobs, and food, and houses that don’t flood.

We don’t currently care about corruption. Not when we are hungry, or broke.

We care about the fact that six people died in the flooding across Johannesburg on Wednesday night.

We care about the child that went missing.

We care about people whose homes were flooded.

And we really care when someone from the Johannesburg Roads Agency is on 702 saying there’s nothing wrong with our stormwater drains; they just were not designed to handle the level of water that came down on Wednesday. Pull the other one, buddy. There have been many other such storms. And, until about a decade ago, the stormwater drains handled them.

Now, they don’t. And that’s because they – like so much of the city’s infrastructure – are not maintained.

Like traffic lights that stop working when it rains because, erm, they are not waterproof. Which really explains why the lights in the UK seem to always be fine, right?

The devil really is in the details. Get those right, and then you can tackle the big stuff: corruption, wastage and other issues that do matter, but that residents don’t care that much about because they are hidden, and don’t seem to immediately affect our day-to-day lives.