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Covid-19 has struck again.
This time it has claimed our comrade and leader, the executive mayor of Johannesburg, Moloantoa Geoffrey Makhubo.
Perhaps it is by a stroke of fate that we have the opportunity to reflect on Makhubo’s life and work just a few days before we honour Nelson Mandela. Mandela Day reminds us of our civic duty and speaks to our instinct to be there for those who have less than we do.
In his own way, Makhubo embodied the values for which this now famous day is observed.
To describe Makhubo’s essence, we borrow from Madiba’s words on the occasion of ANC president Oliver Tambo’s funeral on May 2 1993:
There can be little doubt that the service rendered by Madiba, Tambo and their generation will be impossible to equal.
Makhubo understood this and did what he could with what he had at his disposal.
As a teenager, he joined the Congress of SA Students at Morris Isaacson High School, in Jabavu, Soweto.
When the uprisings in Soweto went up a notch in the mid-1980s as the tide against the apartheid state, Makhubo’s family tried – I could add, in vain – to temper the young man’s revolutionary zeal by posting him to Bophutatswana to ensure he completed his matric.
Makhubo proceeded to Wits University where he earned a BCom degree. It was there that he joined the Azanian Student Organisation, the predecessor of the present day SA Students Congress.
He played an important role in helping build and rebuild structures of the ANC Youth League across Johannesburg.
It was therefore a logical progression when he was later elected, initially treasurer and later chairperson, of the ANC in the greater Johannesburg region.
With the technical and academic skills to become anything he might have wanted to be, Makhubo put all those aside and responded to the call of the ANC to deploy his talents at the service of the City of Johannesburg.
READ: DA embarrassed as its own members vote for ANC’s Makhubo to become Joburg mayor
He abandoned his flourishing consultancy business for a life that is often thankless. A life in which complete strangers think nothing of describing you and saying what they like about you.
It was a life that meant that his mother, his wife, daughters and other loved ones would now hear complete strangers offer opinions, some harsh and hurtful, about a man they had only known through the media or seen from a distance.
Makhubo was made of sterner stuff. He rolled with the punches, mostly because he had to.
It is a given that the ANC is contested terrain.
Makhubo fully understood that politics was both the art of the possible and war by other means, to slightly misquote the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.
He came prepared. He read or commissioned work on subjects that would help him have a better grasp of matters pertaining to either the party or the state, just so he could make quality input.
READ: Gauteng ANC shapes party future
He had a granular understanding of the matters that came before council and could give anyone minute details of each of Johannesburg’s 135 wards.
A born-and-bred Joburger, he loved his city. He never grew tired of reminding anyone willing to listen that Johannesburg was one of the few cities in the world founded on the mining industry that had been able to reinvent itself or that was not founded along a river or a port.
Contrary to the view that Johannesburg was falling apart, he believed that it was going through a rebirth, messy perhaps, but still, a rebirth.
If he loved the city, it was nothing compared with what he felt about Orlando Pirates. The club and the ANC ran in his veins.
Makhubo knew how to party. Colleagues and, sometimes, members of his staff would leave his home or public hang-out long after midnight. The earliest to arrive in the office would be surprised to find him there or see him put in a shift as though the previous night was just a figment of their imagination.
In his work, he paid attention to detail and had the memory of an elephant. He read every report and would call out officials regurgitating old reports – some from his tenure as MMC for finance before 2016 – now repackaged nicely in the hope that nobody would notice.
It is never easy to speak of one’s friend and comrade of many decades in the past tense. Yet we must. It is a duty we wish we never had to perform yet there are never enough words to fully describe either the man or the feeling of loss. I am comforted in my difficulty by the realisation that it has never been easy for anyone at any point in history.
The words attributed to Pericles, the Athenian general and statesman who was given the task of speaking at the funeral of his fellow Athenians who had died in the Peloponnesian War (431 to 432 BCE) make this point:
Lala ngoxolo, Chairman. Robala ka kagiso EM. Lala ngoxolo nkokheli. Kudala uzabalaza.
Cllr Mgcina is the MMC for health and social development in the City of Johannesburg, and acting executive mayor. She is also deputy chairperson of the greater Johannesburg region of the ANC
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