City Elections

High speed trains in Tokyo or Washington run on computers now, but there is still somebody in the drivers box. How about cities? Do mayors run them? No, I won’t Google it. Let me use my experience in living in cities. For starters, mayors love big scissors, not small like kitchen scissors or a dress designer’s pair of scissors.

Mayors use them to cut ribbons. They must be quite big so that television and cellphone cameras can see them when the mayor officially opens a shopping mall, school or hockey stadium.

Mayors also deliver opening remarks, speech writers prepare for them, for the opening of multicultural festivals and national celebrations like Canada Day and Veterans’ Day. In a nutshell, they attend community events with the potential of high velocity media presence.

There’s money involved so I guess mayors oversee the housekeeping budget, cut and paste here and there, rob Peter to pay Paul, or permanently rob somebody. It won’t be cyclists for sure because the bicycle lobby is very strong, which means more bike lanes.

The mayor doesn’t care about pedestrian safety on pavements. That is why he doesn’t have an online ad that cyclists must use bike lanes and not harass pavement users.

Should I run for mayor? Maybe not.  I just remembered the mayor’s budget includes money for police cruisers, laptops, uniforms and grooming. I avoid the police at all costs. In apartheid South Africa, they knocked on our door at the crack of dawn and arrested visiting cousins because they were not in the house permit.

Cities belonged to whites and we Africans were there only to dig gold, sweep streets, then go back to rural areas. According to apartheid policy, we were trespassing on our own land. No, I'm definitely not running for mayor.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.