Ask yourself, City of Joburg: who let the dogs out in the war on us?

Taking away the city's green spaces is a declaration of war by a metro totally alienated from its real purpose

- Shaun de Waal

‘Stop the alienation of our parks, dams and koppies,” said the flyer stuck under my windscreen wiper while I was parked at the park that is, the area between Marks Park and the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens in Emmarentia that’s generally known as the Dog Park. I'm not sure it has official capital letters, but let's put them in.

I would possibly have put an exclamation mark in that top line, there - “Stop the alienation of our parks, dams and koppies!” Now doesn’t that look and feel better?

Stop! Stop the alienation!

I'd even take that “alienation” out of inverted commas, except that here it is being used in a specialist manner. Something to do with property, zoning and how uses can be changed by, among other means, the fiat of the City of Joburg, with a bit of public consultation thrown in.

That consultation with us, the mere rate-paying, voting citizens of the city, will probably be scheduled for the hours of midnight to 2am, on a weeknight, and held in one of the rented buildings in which the CoJ does its work, if you can call it work, the actual Civic Centre having more-or-less fallen into disrepair, which is to say it's a wreck and CoJ, it seems, can't fix it.

So many things the CoJ can’t fix... Which reminds one of all the things City Power, Joburg Water and the Joburg Roads Agency can't fix. Things the provincial government can't fix, things the national government and Cyril Ramaphosa can't fix...

I'd also put an apostrophe into “Joburg”, in the “City of Joburg” formulation, except it doesn't deserve one.

Alienation, then. What the CoJ means is that the 173ha that “belong to the people”, to quote the flyer, will be alienated from their original uses and turned into something else.