Pay less attention to presidents and premiers and focus on mayors, they matter way more

Daily Maverick

28-05-2025

We pay way too much attention to presidents and premiers and not nearly enough to mayors. Nothing that the first two ever do can directly affect me this afternoon, this week or even this year. In fact, most of what they do never touches sides in real terms.
But the mayor can change my life within an hour. Is the power restored after an outage, the gushing water breach in the road stemmed, the blocked sewage pipe cleared, the rubbish collected, the storm-felled tree across the highway removed, the fire brigade turning up timeously?
If I lived in a flooded township, it would be the mayor who could ensure that emergency help was available and that it arrived.
Competence and incorruptibility at municipal level make a massive difference. And the converse is true. The destruction caused by incompetence and dishonesty at a municipality is both enormous and immediate.
And, the converse of the converse is that the opportunity for rapid renewal is immense. Just see what the DA's energetic Chris Pappas has achieved inside a mere 12 months as mayor of uMngeni.
Aside from Cape Town, excellently served for the past three years by a hard-working, pragmatic and highly functional mayor in Geordin Hill-Lewis, our track record of governance in major metropoles is abysmal.
Johannesburg is the well-publicised poster child in this regard – eight mayors in six years – but the rest are no better.
Nelson Mandela Bay has had 10 mayors in 10 years, including Danny Jordaan for a brief time, and they've had an astonishing 15 city managers in five years.
Tshwane has had six mayors in six years and Mangaung five in five. eThekwini's recent mayoral list includes Zandile Gumede, investigated by the Hawks in connection with fraud (like fake employment creation), money laundering and corruption.
There was a time when our city mayors did not matter that much. They were fundamentally ceremonial and got to prance about with a silly chain around their necks. Often, they rotated on an annual basis.
But nowadays they are elected, executive leaders of widespread metropoles with massive budgets and the capacity to inflict misery on millions through exorbitant rates and minimal service delivery.
This accurately reflects the fact that the English word 'mayor' is derived from the Latin 'magnus', meaning great or powerful, via the French derivation of 'maire'. (Before that, their equivalents in Britain were known as 'portreeves' … which, in my view, is a far superior name.)
Stepping stone to higher office
All of this is why the municipal elections at the end of next year should matter to everyone as much as, if not more than, the national ones in 2029.
The candidates should be the brightest and best that parties can find, instead of burying their limited talent on the dozing backbenches of Parliament or in the Cabinet.
The testing experience of being a successful mayor ideally should be a training ground and a stepping stone for national office.
Helen Zille, whose zeal and attention to detail best suited her to the on-the-ground work of being Cape Town mayor for three years, is a local example of this playing out. So, to a lesser extent, is Herman Mashaba's transition from DA Joburg mayor to national shapeshifting irritant.
And there are rumours, which he denies, that Hill-Lewis will take a shot at John Steenhuisen's DA leadership job next April.
The ANC tends to go the other way — deploying downwards from the Cabinet to dysfunctional metropoles without any success. Maybe Parks Tau, who somehow survived five years as Johannesburg mayor from 2011 and is now an up-and-coming trade minister, can break that mould.
The French provide the best example of this kind of leadership production line. Five of its last eight presidents were mayors at some point in their careers, as were 18 of the country's last 24 prime ministers.
In London, there have been three mayors under the new structure. One, Boris Johnson, became prime minister. The incumbent, Sadiq Khan, is a good bet to follow him to Downing Street someday.
In the US, the sanest, sharpest and most promising figure in their tainted political landscape is Pete Buttigieg, who is known as Mayor Pete because of his eight years' running the small city of South Bend, Indiana. But no mayor of a major American metropole has ever become president unless you count Grover Cleveland's brief experience in 1881 as the boss of Buffalo (and two others in the even more distant past who ran small towns).
Possibly more relevant to us is Turkiye, where their authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, first made his name as mayor of Istanbul and is now doing his best to illegitimately thwart his rising rival Ekrem Imamoglu, who is the current mayor of that fabulous city.
Or Mexico, where their first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, came to everyone's attention as a savvy and strong mayor of its sprawling capital, Mexico City.
There's a very strange example in the Philippines where the highly controversial Rodrigo Duterte served seven terms as a 'law and order' mayor of Davao City before becoming a wild and often lawless president, and then being arrested by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, murder, torture and rape. He is currently in detention in The Hague, awaiting trial from where, in absentia, he has successfully run once again for election as Davao City mayor.
I am not claiming that being a mayor automatically ensures great national leadership skills – hello Boris! – but it is a real job affecting real people in real time. You face consequences and you get to understand the full implications of actions (or inactions) coming down to you from the national or provincial levels.
If you start political life up in the rarified air of Cabinet meetings and Parliament, where the indirect tools of words, policies, legislation and budget allocations are all you have to work with, you may never really get what truly matters — which is the garbage being collected tomorrow and the potholes being filled yesterday. DM