Johannesburg as the republic’s proving ground

JAK KOSEFF

The privilege of serving as Special adviser to the Executive Mayor of the nation’s first city means I can reflect on this most responsibly through the lens of Johannesburg – both because it is recognised by just about everyone as a dashboard for the state of our present social and economic order and, for those paying attention, as the republic’s best laboratory for understanding how to give full cry to prosperity and opportunity as a street-level, lived possibility for the many.

The challenges we face as Johannesburg, the republic writ large will face in time, and – by the same logic – the best of our efforts as City government can become national guidelines.

This path is not an easy one. Ten thousand people, on average, arrive at the fringes of the city every month. Too many of them join the 1,2 million (800 000 of them youth) trapped on the wrong side of the barriers to opportunity in a patchwork of race and class-based ghettoes, transport and housing costs enforcing divisions once jackbooted in law.  

The Corridors of Freedom programme lights a different way: targeted government spending tracking with incentives to the private sector to build out new mixed income, mixed use realities along our new public transit routes, and in nodes across the wider city – many of which will now start harnessing the local spending power hidden in our townships and informal settlements. (Soweto alone spends R4,8 billion a year on goods and services.)

Johannesburg’s economy has literally doubled since 1994. But though the poker table is double the size, most of the chips are held by the kind of people that held them two decades back (one part the long shadow of apartheid education systems, one part the failure of institutional imagination in the democratic era).

And there is certainly a vacuum where thousands of smaller enterprises should be creating equity for their owners and first-rung jobs for our massive unused labour pool.

But the city is already demonstrating that sectoral business covenants can build specific skills pools and pipelines of new enterprises reaching into the most deprived communities.

Our Massive Open Online Varsity (MOOV) network of video-enabled training sites is already creating a new foundational and vocational skills pipeline.

Using flipped classroom math training through Khan Academy, for example (using smart analytics to figure out where gaps in comprehension are), rapidly increases basic maths ability. Using task-based video training to build specific curricula – defined by employers and sector bodies – opens up potentially thousands of new livelihood pathways that don’t run through universities.

Seeing the Jozi@work programme come to life throughout the City (turning new micro-enterprises under developmental supervision into producers of city services) has confirmed for me there is no lack of commercial instinct or enterprising spirit among the economically inactive. 

The same is clear through the micro-franchising and youth enterprise channels the City is running through partnerships under Vulindlel’eJozi.

This is all incredibly tough to get right, but the present efforts at local level are starting to show what’s possible when government and those who hold the most chips at the democratic-era poker table stop indulging in a culture of lamentation and take some educated risks on approaches that can fix some of the market failures, build business value and create broad based paths to prosperity.

I celebrate this Freedom Day having seen for myself that real steps can be taken towards a state of affairs that much more closely matches what we promised ourselves in 1994. It’s up to us, collectively, to prove we can see it through.  

Jak Koseff joined the City of Johannesburg in 2007, following five years of work and study in London and New York City, specialising in urban social and economic development.

He currently serves in the Executive Mayors Office as Special Adviser: Priority Projects.