OPINION: If you can fix Johannesburg for the G20, you can fix it for residents

By Desirée Erasmus

Johannesburg has just proved an embarrassing point: the city can work, it simply chooses when, and for whom. 

In the weeks prior to the G20 Leaders’ Summit, ratepayers were privy to a miracle of extreme municipal competence. 

Potholes were filled, flowers planted, streetlights repaired, billboards erected, and a phalanx of workers deployed to scrub away the grime.

Too, security was suddenly not a problem. 

Some 3 500 extra police officers were deployed, the army was placed on standby, and carefully controlled protest zones were demarcated so that outrage could be kept at a polite distance.  

The message was unmistakable for long-suffering residents. When presidents are watching, the government remembers how to behave like one.

But step a few kilometres away from the G20 bubble and you find persistent power cuts, erratic water supplies, cratered roads and rotting rubbish – or, as one commentator put it, normalised “daily