DAVID LEWIS: Joburg could learn a thing or two from Mexico City

My wonderful wife and I are nearing the end of a two-month stay in Mexico City, where we are visiting my equally wonderful daughter who lives and works here. But before I tell you about this magical city, one caveat: I’ve been staying in a middle-class urban neighbourhood, though I’ve also spent considerable time with my daughter in her working-class urban neighbourhood.   

Greater Mexico City is one of the world’s largest urban agglomerations, with a population of about 23-million people, four times that of greater Johannesburg. It’s a constant and pleasant surprise, especially if one’s standard is Johannesburg, where I live and, for the most part, love living.   

The parts of the city where I’ve been hanging out in are beautiful. I expected a uniformly gritty, ugly urban mass, but instead I look out of my first-floor apartment window at, within reach, the lower heights of an ancient rubber tree, part of the abundant foliage of this neighbourhood and most others I’ve visited.

The greenery reminds me a little of Johannesburg neighbourhoods such as Parkview and Greenside, though the residents of those neighbourhoods live in large houses or complexes behind high walls, not in small apartments where you lean out of the window and order a hot tamale from the passing vendor on the street below. You know he’s the tamale vendor because his signal, apparently identical across Mexico and centuries old, differs from that of the maize vendor or the buyer of discarded household goods, or the garbage collectors.

Wouldn’t it be great if, in all parts of Johannesburg, we could step out of our apartments and buy a perfectly charred mielie or a few samosas? But how would the neighbours react to a lot of poor people walking around the suburb or, worse, cooking their wares at the gates of their expensively secured residences? 

In fact, far from street traders, Johannesburg middle-class neighbourhoods don’t even have proximate small shops and family restaurants and bars that are as inseparable a part of my Mexico City ’hood as the residences. In Joburg there may be a single street of stores and restaurants, as in Parkview or Parkhurst, but the streets on which people live are devoid of life. It’s no wonder crime flourishes in our middle-class suburbs. 

In Mexico City, as far as I can discern, the streets are impeccably clean. Public transport — trams, buses, an overhead cable car and an enormous underground rail network — all work efficiently and are among the least costly in the world. Public transport is pretty safe. There was a growing problem of sexual harassment on buses, so the seats in the front half of all buses are strictly reserved for women, children and disabled people.

Where I live the street appears remarkably safe. I’m sure this varies from area to area but I see people in the streets until late at night without a visible police presence. Mexico City is ranked 33rd in global city crime rates. Pretoria ranks second, Durban third and Johannesburg fifth. 

The public spaces are extraordinary. In the middle of the city there is a beautiful, forested park larger than New York’s Central Park, which is safe and spotless. There are said to be about 170 public museums and art galleries in the city. Of the several I’ve visited all are teeming with locals, and well managed by helpful staff who are proud of their contribution to their city’s cultural life. I’d be nervous about taking a visitor to most Joburg parks and I’d be embarrassed to take a visitor to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. 

Above all, the sense of civic pride is startling. We were here on Independence Day, when 250,000 people came to greet the president in the central city square. There were no free T-shirts, not even free bus rides, on offer. They came because they’re proud of their city and country. And when last were you in a city where the most highly revered individuals are contemporary artists — Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, revolutionaries to boot? 

And yet and yet and yet! 

The streets are adorned with posters showing some of the estimated 100,000 disappeared citizens, usually victims of  police and local political complicity with the notorious drug cartels that terrorise the northern cities bordering the US. A main boulevard is the site of monuments built by civil society groups commemorating the disappeared and murdered citizens. 

In the old city centre I encounter large protests focused on a disturbing initiative by the outgoing president that will fire the country’s 7,000 judges, who will be replaced by elected judges. And there are murmurings that the outgoing president, Lopez Obrador, previously mayor of the city who was elected on the promise of breaking the drug cartels, has entered into some sort of truce with the organised crime groups and even that his electoral campaigns have accepted funding from the cartels. 

Obrador vacated office on October 1 at the end of his non-renewable six-year term with an approval rating in the high seventies. He is one of those rare populists who has kept critical aspects of his promise to the poor majority through a huge hike in the minimum wage and old age pensions. He’s a famously skilled communicator (President Cyril Ramaphosa take note that he holds a press conference at 7am every weekday). But it seems the deal is “I’ll take steps to reduce poverty, you give up civil liberties.” The electoral commission is under attack, the judicial reforms are extremely disturbing, and journalists and civil society organisations are particularly vulnerable. And growth rates are tepid. 

But Mexico City has clearly got something right, certainly when compared with the mess that is Joburg. I don’t know enough to identify the critical components that have gone into making this city what it is. I do know several Mexico City mayors rose to the presidency. Would you want to see any of the past half-dozen or so hapless, corrupt Joburg mayors ascend to the presidency of the country? 

However, absence does make the heart a little more upbeat. I’ve not been able to ignore news about SA and I read some cheering reports. I firmly believe the National Prosecuting Authority and Hawks are making real progress against corruption. Soon the prospect of detection and prosecution will start acting as a deterrent. I doubt this is reflected in daily volumes of street crime, but then the SA Police Service is the biggest elephant in our room.   

The government of national unity (GNU) seems to be holding together and is responsible for a palpable increase in confidence on a range of important fronts. The biggest threat to the GNU is undoubtedly the Gauteng ANC. Not because its refusal to constitute a governing coalition different from that of the national government is necessarily illegitimate, but because it’s rooted in the provincial leadership’s efforts to prevent a substantial governing partner from further exposing the orgy of looting of the province’s metropoles perpetrated by ANC and EFF governors. 

We could learn something from Mexico City. Invite some of its city leaders to Johannesburg. Show them the big hole in one of our city’s main streets and explain why it has not been repaired. Take them to the Johannesburg Art Gallery but avoid the stagnant puddles on the floor. Visit Diepsloot and ask the residents to tell them about life as an immigrant in our great city. Just don’t introduce them to any of our past half-dozen mayors. The visitors too may despair! 

• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a co-founder and director of Corruption Watch.