Diamond city shines brightest with lessons for Joburg

Kimberley, often seen as the font of modern South Africa, predates Johannesburg by 15 years and still has much it can teach the City of Gold. For those who grew up or lived in Kimberley, South Africa’s diamond city is often seen as the font of modern South Africa. Cape Town might be the Mother City, but Kimberley’s vanity has always had it as Africa’s industrial OG. There’s a proud record of firsts in the McGregor Museum, from electric streetlights to the stock exchange, drive-in bars and even aviation. Kimberley predates Johannesburg by a good 15 years and the money that the diamond barons made funded the deep-level mining that made Jozi the Eldorado of the modern world for a while. But the Diamond City and the City of Gold also share the fact that both depend on having their drinking water pumped in from the Vaal, with Joburg also getting a huge amount from the Lesotho Highlands Scheme. Times might have changed since the diamond rush, but Kimberley still has much that it can teach Johannesburg, like what to expect when a planned maintenance event on the single pipeline from Riverton on the Vaal goes awry and residents start to panic and, indeed, go feral when the municipality starts trying to fill up the reservoirs again. This happened notably in March 2018 and has become a cycle that’s been repeated several times, notably again in May and in October in 2022. Johannesburg has well documented problems of its own that extend well beyond keeping the reservoirs full, to losing almost half of its drinking water to leaks in its ageing infrastructure. Water management and preservation are going to be key focus areas for most municipalities in the next administrations and, particularly, for Africa’s world-class city. But there’s another thing that Kimberley could teach Joburg, a good lesson this time. Decades ago, the city’s leaders embarked on an very altruistic project to plant lemon and olive trees on the suburban verges. There was the beautification aspect, but the greater win was the food security it provided for anyone walking past. Joburg has an abundance of natural green lungs, its own vanity, of course, is to be the world’s largest man-made urban forest. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the next generation of civic leaders made it the world’s largest free urban garden too? Of course, running the city properly, from keeping the lights on to filling potholes, plugging leaks and cutting corruption at the same time, would be an unimaginable bonus.