G20 Summit rendering the poor of Johannesburg invisible and their voices silent: A Reflective Essay

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

Yes, we can feel it in the air. What with the jets regularly flying over our suburbs. There is activity in Johannesburg. The streets, especially in strategic places close to routes where important people who are currently descending on old lovely Johannesburg as they drive past in their armored cars on their way to NASREC, are being cleaned up.  Where electricity supply has in the past been interrupted, the lights are on now. Even water is not disrupted.

And will probably not be disrupted this week, running into the weekend. Even old Joubert Park in Hillbrow, often a scary scene, like that from a horror movie, often always chocking with litter, filth, and social misfits, was being cleaned up the other day.

Only this time, the cleaners were not the usual mamas that we often see cleaning up the city’s mess in the evening. Instead, holders of the newly purchased brooms, were familiar faces who suddenly took off their expensive design suits to put on newly bought overalls. Ready to do the ‘dirty’ dirt job, often reserved for the underpaid and overworked mamas. These were the CEOs of the City of Johannesburg’s entities, that are clearly overpaid and yet their value to citizens, even their qualifications for the top positions they hold, is ever under scrutiny and questioned. This was symbolic, but it showed that if they want to do they work, it can be done.

Only a few weeks ago, there was an overwhelming outcry from street traders who were evicted from their trading spaces, often chaotic, overcrowded, unregulated and unsafe, who were evicted by city officials. The officials had suddenly rediscovered the by-law pocket book somewhere in their offices where it has been gathering dust for years now.

Forgotten and only remembered now that high powered people from the wealthy countries are descending on old Johannesburg. The officials wanted permits from traders to trade in the city, permits they very well knew the traders would not have.

They never had because the city’s department that is supposed to offer such pieces of paper and allocate space for traders had long been sleeping on the job. Litigation ensued, and as expected, the judge ordered the city to give permits to the traders within two weeks, something they have failed to do for years. Whether that will happen time will tell.

However on the eve of the deadline ordered by the court to issue the permits to the traders, only 160 out of the R2800 had been verified and handed the permits. The court order required that by 18 November, 2025, the fair and just verification of traders and issuing of permits must be completed.

The question that arises then is, what will happen to the rest of the traders who had not been verified and allocated these permits as the city seems to suggest that their job was done. Finished by the court ordered date, the City of Joburg mayor Dada Morero seemed to suggest at a media conference held on Tuesday, November 18, 2025.

Life can sometimes be cruel to the weak and vulnerable in society. Now law and order is suddenly demanded in the chaotic streets of Johannesburg CBD. Streets that officialdom had long abandoned and now occupied by a macabre phenomenon.

A strange mix of a struggling poor trader trying to eke out a living in the streets for a starving family who call either a leaking shack in Slovo Informal settlement on the periphery of the city, or a rotting, dilapidated, overcrowded  flat in Johannesburg hijacked by the greedy, ruthless and dangerous of Johannesburg, a home.

You may as well ask, why this flurry of activity. Why this sudden need for creating order and law in the streets of Johannesburg CBD, that for the longest of time have been abandoned and ignored only for the rule of the jungle to take over.  A city that the wealthy and even the wise have for the longest of time, avoided at all costs. Only travelling through it, if they cannot avoid it.

This is because the wealthy and global figures of influence are here, attending the G20 Summit in nearby NASREC, a 15 minute drive distance from Johannesburg CBD. That is where leaders ….are meeting to shape the architecture of global economies and politics by attempting to final solutions to existential challenges the world is facing today: Climate change, inequality, sustainable energy. The list inexhaustible.

Therefore in the context of these big issues, the voice of the vulnerable is muted, their issues of immediacy, such as putting food on the table for their starving families get ignored. Rendered irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things.

In fact they are rendered invisible and voiceless. Only voices of the dominant in society, global politics are amplified. Suffer the poor and the weak. Starve the invisible. Your life does not matter. When the big men are done with their deliberations at NASREC by Sunday, November 23, 2025, your needs will be catered for through either a Leader’s Declaration or the Chairman’s ….Whatever.

This is promised, as if hunger and disease that constantly threatens the vulnerable around the world in general and the Global South in particular will suddenly vanish once the pronouncements are made by the leaders at NASREC on Sunday. Such is the fate of the poor and vulnerable of this world. Their fate inextricably tied to the decision reached by the wealthy and powerful reached in air conditioned boardrooms and lounges.