Sprucing up Joburg

G20: President certainly prompted by summit to complain over rot

- Moneyweb

It was quite something to see President Cyril Ramaphosa addressing a council sitting in the City of Joburg earlier this month.

Ramaphosa was surely embarrassed about the state of the city during the G20 (Group of 20) Foreign Ministers' Meeting last month – overgrown verges, broken barriers, potholes and intersection after intersection of non-working traffic lights.

City work teams scrambled to cut overgrown grass and weeds on access routes to Nasrec, but this was too late.

So Ramaphosa did what Ramaphosa does, he "challenged" city officials, without really publicly admonishing them, to "restore" the city to its "former glory".

What's curious is that Ramaphosa seems to have only noticed the state of Joburg last month.

Where has he been for the past seven years?

The city's decline has been steady for the past two decades.