Vote for the psychopath — Joburg needs it

Whoever gets to wear the chain of office, or occupies the office of chains – seldom has a symbol of power been so appropriately ambiguous – faces the most formidable challenges.

The City is broke, and doesn’t have cash to buy paper for their offices, never mind paying contractors. The entities that deliver critical services – like Joburg Water and City Power – are mostly incapable of fulfilling their obligations. The City’s financial backbone, its billing system, is delusory. Revenue collections are dipping. Losses of water and electricity through illegal connections and theft are increasing. Some areas are not getting water for weeks at a time, others suffer repeated electricity cut-offs. We have one person, one vote, and on our roads we have one car, three potholes.

Whoever is elected will need to clean out the incompetent and corrupt who dominate City structures, and – perhaps toughest of all – have to tackle the unaffordable long-term pay agreement the current administration has put in place.

The job will require cold-blooded ruthlessness, steely courage, manic energy and suicidal determination to achieve even a modicum of success. 

Wikipedia and an AI agent, the essential tools of over-hasty journalism, tell me that a psychopath “is an individual characterised by a persistent lack of empathy, a shallow or absent conscience, and manipulative or antisocial behaviour, often hidden beneath a mask of superficial charm”.

Sounds like a job description, doesn’t it? The superficial charm is important, since this person will probably have to negotiate a shaky and conflict-ridden coalition. We don’t need real charm, just enough to hold together a bunch of self-serving, rancorous politicians.

Or maybe it needs quasi-magical powers, like a witch on a broom who can cast spells on the wicked and corrupt and dazzle us with the good and the competent.

There are 82 political entities standing in Johannesburg, so how does one decide which one has a leader that has best demonstrated what, for our purposes here, are essential virtues?

Ideology has little to do with it, because all we care about is who can do the best clean-up and clean-out, install the most skilled and competent technocrats and let them get on with it. We have to leave aside for now questions of whether the long-term solutions are neoliberal or socialist, because our leadership needs are more basic than this.

Does race still matter? It does, sadly, but we have to be realistic and pragmatic in choosing a mayor at this critical moment. 

We will settle for anyone who is competent and psychopathic.

On the face of it, we have a wide choice. There are 7,443 candidates for 135 wards, which is an average of 55 per ward. This will make our two ballot papers longer than the distance between any two potholes. If each of the candidates in my ward knocks on my door for a quick conversation about why I should vote for them, I will need to set aside nine hours.

AI and the BBC (a powerful combination) tell me that roughly 1% of an average population is psychopathic, which means about 74 of the candidates might be fit for the job, probably more given that they have been dilly enough to put their names forward.

We have mayoral candidates who are narcissists, and we have gangsters, both successful and aspirant. We have religious extremists and jokers. We have the anonymous from the major party that refuses to name a mayoral candidate. We have one candidate who is standing in 44 wards, in what appears to be a bid to form the most powerful one-person caucus in the council.

We have so much choice and yet so little. It is what is called a choiceless democracy, and it has become a global phenomenon.

Yet, I am clear who I am going to vote for. There is one psychopath who stands out among them all. DM