Further Ruminations on Living in Johannesburg

Electrical connections strung through a tree in Saxonwold Johannesburg

Aweh dearly beloved fellow ruminants & groupies

In several earlier blogs, I have touched on living in Johannesburg. Johannesburg is in Gauteng province, and I have lived my entire life within Gauteng. I was born in Pretoria (now Thswane) and moved to Johannesburg when I was eleven years old.

Recent events coinciding with the middle of winter have caused another bout of depression about Johannesburg. I do not like Johannesburg winters although they are comparatively mild compared to many other cities.

Where does Johannesburg sit in the pecking order of cities? Gemini refused to answer this politically incorrect question and provided a generic lecture about subjectivity and personal preferences. Fortunately, other sites rank cities. There is the world’s best cities report. This lists the world’s one hundred best cities according to liveability, lovability, and prosperity. Surprisingly Johannesburg does not make the list. Even more surprisingly neither Cape Town nor any African city is on this list. Perhaps there is something to this subjectivity issue after all.

Another report ranks the top 100 city brands in the world and Cape Town makes it to number 60 with Johannesburg at 72. London also tops this list.

I have been fortunate enough to have visited 23 of the cities in the world’s best cities report. London is ranked at the top of both reports and I have been there many times. London is undoubtedly a great city particularly if one of the measures is prosperity. However, I do not give it a great score on liveability for raising a family unless you are extremely wealthy. Extreme wealth is of course another subjective thing but for the sake of this discussion, I would suggest a net worth of more than $10 million. Houses in London are extremely expensive.

If you want a family home in London in a fashionable area even  £2 million ($2.6 million) might not be enough. A one-bedroom flat in South Kensington? Just paying off the capital with no interest will cost $11 000 per month. This is reflected in rents as well. All this means that mere mortals struggle to raise a family in London. You need to live further away and potentially have a horrible commute to get to work in crowded trains and the Tube. Not my idea of liveable.

If it’s affordable living that you are looking for renting a home in Johannesburg is six times cheaper than London. By global standards, housing is very cheap in Johannesburg. Very few houses cost £1 million let alone £2 million and they would be large mansions or multi-story penthouses and not flats. Our four-bedroom home on half an acre in a beautiful garden in the very good central suburb, Saxonwold, in Johannesburg is worth less than £250 000.

There is however a very good reason for this. Johannesburg is an increasingly dysfunctional city. Recent events at our house reminded me of this. On Thursday 4 July the local municipal electricity supplier, Citypower, disconnected our electricity claiming we owed them about $1000. All invoices had been paid and there were no arrears. There was no invoice or explanation for the demand of $1000. This is not my first billing issue with the city of Johannesburg nor the first time we have been cut off.

This is not an isolated incident and three houses in our street faced the same fate as well as the local state school in our area. This school does not cater to the wealthy. What happened to us is widespread across Johannesburg. Having been through this before I knew if that we wanted our electricity back soon, I needed to pay the $1000 and try and resolve this later which may not be possible. For those who cannot afford an unexpected $1000 payment to CityPower weeks without electricity looms.

Why is Citypower doing this? A trite answer is because they can. There are no consequences for them. The next level of why is that they are in extreme financial distress. They are making monthly losses and their debt levels have reached $1 billion. They are now also in arrears to the national power utility Eskom who are demanding payment. So how about just cutting off people and demanding money.

So, with the help of lawyers who specialise in this and strongly worded letters about wrongful disconnection our power was restored on Monday. Four days with no electricity. I wasted a lot of time on this. We were able to survive with our solar system. For those who do not have a solar system no electricity at all.

How is Citypower doing with maintenance and keeping the electricity distribution infrastructure in good shape and legally compliant? The featured image shows how well they are doing maintenance with cables wrapped around poles and strung through the trees. Streetlights in Saxonwold have not been working for years. Recently robbers murdered an old man just down the road from us. This caused significant pressure from the community to fix the streetlights.

So Citypower fixed them. This is what the electrical engineer from our local community organisation said about the work they did, “They have butchered the electrical network in Saxonwold to get the lights working. “The contractor was too lazy to diagnose the fault, so they punctured a hole in the transformer building to get the cables out. Strung the wires across the road by tying them to a tree, left the live wires exposed to the public, and generally did a third-world job”. The work is sloppy, dangerous, and not legally compliant. Will this get fixed soon? Unlikely.

There is an exodus of middle-class and affluent people from Gauteng. In 2011there were 1.9 million white people in Gauteng and in 2022 there were 1.5 million. Why do I now bring the issue of race into this? Purely because it is still the case that race is still a proxy for wealth in South Africa. Where did these people go? They have probably emigrated or semigrated to the Western Cape where municipal services work. I have placed a pin in my voodoo doll specially reserved for the manager of Citypower.

Soon winter in Johannesburg will be over and Johannesburg has some of the best weather in the world. Our garden in spring is beautiful and I look forward to that.

Regards

Bruce