Vandalism rife long before G20

Being a metropolitan municipality has its benefits. Not only do they have the use of the South African Police Service, but anybody who's ever been around Johannesburg knows the power of the metro cops.

- RICHARD CHEMALY

Yet Johannesburg can't seem to stop the vandals and saboteurs.

A new tactic to address this seems to be ignoring the last 10 years and expecting us to believe that bashing of street lights is some sort of protest action ahead of the G20 summit.

As if every street light has been burning successfully until a few weeks ago and we never had infrastructure theft.

If you fall for the narrative, you'd believe that illegal electricity connections are merely imaginative and copper cable thieves are actually tender service providers clearing way for fibre optics.

What's the G20 got to do with the price of a meter of stolen railway? Law enforcement has been unable to protect the city's infrastructure since apartheid leveraged infrastructure decay to enforce segregation.