Every Tuesday, Ahmed Kajee sits down with a mayoral candidate to discuss their vision. This week, he spoke with Lukhona Mnguni, Rise Mzansi’s mayoral candidate in Johannesburg. Below is an excerpt from the discussion.
Ahmed: We normally would start the show with [the question of] why residents should be voting for you. I’ll get that to you in a minute, but [you were] born in the Eastern Cape [and have] come up to the city of Johannesburg.
Lukhona: I’ve got skin in the game. I have resided here long enough and, of course, the beauty of Johannesburg and its cosmopolitan nature is that it is actually a city that was built by migrants. My five-year-old son was born here and he’s growing up here. I’ve got a responsibility to ensure that this city works and I’m not tempted to ship him off to another city or country.
Ahmed: Why should residents of Johannesburg be voting for you?
Lukhona: The city of Johannesburg needs fresh leadership. It needs leadership that has demonstrated a commitment to getting South Africa to work, leadership that is incorruptible and is not going to steal money that does not belong to them.We need a leadership that is capable to turn around the city of Johannesburg.
Cities do collapse and in the context of coalitions, the city of Johannesburg also needs a leader who is a bridge builder across the different political strands. I can talk to almost any politician from any political party. That doesn’t make you a compromising politician; it makes you a collaborative politician.
Ahmed: You were a political commentator, researcher and activist. You went from critiquing political parties to being alongside them. Why did you make that move?
Lukhona: I actually spent the last 15 years preparing for this moment. I’ve done a lot of work in the local government space with the South African Local Government Association (SALGA), and I’ve taught in politics. There are two things that probably motivated me the most: the first is that I just didn’t feel that political parties were fielding the right people [and] the second how governance has deteriorated
Ahmed: You speak about water and infrastructure, electricity, transport, economic development, housing and spatial inequality, crime and corruption, service delivery. There’s also immigration, which has been across the news cycle. Where is your first priority from all of those?
Lukhona: Our first priority is water infrastructure. When we say water is life, I think we underestimate what we are trying to communicate. Anything else and everything else flows from that. We want to make sure that in the first 70 days in office, we’ve had a proper surgical analysis of Johannesburg Water … and begin the necessary work of ensuring that there’s investment.
Ahmed: How exactly does that happen?
Lukhona: It’s a prioritisation question. You’ve got to understand quickly where your infrastructure sabotage is happening and put enough safeguards into security and securing of that infrastructure. There is the much more deeper [issue], which is thousands of kilometres of water and sanitation pipelines that need to be replaced in the city of Jo’burg. Insofar as that is concerned, we are looking at how do you mobilise capital to inject into replacing because some pipes are beyond their lifespan. You need to dig them up and replace them with new material so that you stabilise the pressure in the water system.
Ahmed: In terms of economic development, where do you see that growth coming from?
Lukhona: Pillar One of our plan is rooting out criminality, because you cannot have a thriving economy in the city of Jo’burg if criminals are running the streets and roaming the streets, taking over taxi ranks and making them drug distribution channels, hijacking buildings for all sorts of things. It’s no longer just the CBD, by the way. It’s communities like Mayfair [and] Windsor East.
Watch the full interview below:
