Thursday.
The sun is hardly up, but the municipal bin lorries have already come and gone — something of a rarity in this part of Durban’s ward 33.
The street is also far cleaner than it has been for quite a while — the verge has been trimmed too — and the hole in the pavement on the corner of Alan Paton Road has finally been filled.
None of these things can be attributed to the unanimous election of Cyril Xaba as Durban’s mayor on Wednesday, the overnight consequences of a new broom sweeping clean.
The new mayor wasn’t driving the rubbish truck, picking up the litter or cutting the grass, after all, but the actual and timeous delivery of municipal services is a welcome glimmer of hope in a city that hasn’t had much to look forward to in recent history.
The sea is still not swimmable, but the city centre had also been cleaned ahead of the council meeting held to elect Xaba, who made it into the mayor’s parlour without a single vote being cast.
It was touch and go for a while as the parties involved in the government of provincial unity tried to find each other over the division of committee chairs and executive committee seats in the negotiations leading up to the council meeting.
For most of the morning, it looked like the Democratic Alliance (DA) would field a mayoral candidate to oppose the ANC ’s, something it has done since eThekwini was incorporated, as talks broke down over the share of the spoils in the city.
This was something the ANC could not afford. It couldn’t count on all of its councillors voting for the party’s candidate — the ANC region didn’t want Xaba as their mayor — and avoiding the vote saved them from a potential embarrassment, or even defeat, in the ballot.
But when the ANC and the DA emerged from their final caucus breaks it was clear that the deal had been done and Xaba would make it over the line without the election being contested.
eThekwini isn’t the only place where new brooms are sweeping clean.
In the department of public works, the incoming minister, Dean Macpherson, is throwing his predecessors for the past decade under the bus, with his disclosure that they didn’t bother to disclose cyber fraud under their watch.
In the department of sports, arts and culture, things are wilding as the new minister, Gayton McKenzie, gets down to work.
Lord Gayton has been shaking matters up since Chief Justice Raymond Zondo administered his oath of office last week.
McKenzie’s sense of humour had Zondo and the rest of the honourable members gathered for the swearing-in laughing, but the bureaucrats who have been sentenced to five years’ hard labour under his watch must be losing theirs.
Redemption has arched — for Gayton at least — and Superfans are running for cover (and new funders) after McKenzie pulled the plug on their payola from the department.
The new minister believes — rightly — that the money could be better spent on school sports, grassroots football and the like, rather than on “celebrity” marketing.
Artists — and artistes — are also running scared, along with the civil servants responsible for the payments, after the new minister threw back the covers with regard to who got what from the department during the Covid-19 lockdown.
By mid-morning on Wednesday the list of payments and beneficiaries who received some good news from the department at the height of the pandemic was out as promised by McKenzie.
Arthur Mafokate must be wishing McKenzie had been given his first choice ministry — home affairs — which would have seen him chasing border jumpers at Beit Bridge, rather than beneficiaries of questionable largesse.
Lists of other forms of funding granted by the department since 2020 are set to follow — along with more red faces, embarrassed silences and, hopefully — some firings, arrests and court appearances.
The department’s communications team are spinning wildly — and appear to be in something of a spin themselves — as McKenzie makes it increasingly clear that his new broom intends to sweep somewhat cleaner than his predecessor’s did.
The traditional methods of “managing” the minister can’t be applied; McKenzie answers to Cyril Ramaphosa, not Luthuli House, so the option of having a word through that route no longer exists.
Gayton has an itchy Twitter finger — hair trigger vibes, actually — and has been firing at will since he got his new gig.
The bureaucrats can’t exactly refuse to hand over the information to their boss, so further chest pains are set to ensue in the upper and lower echelons of the corridors of power — and in the networks which have been feeding off the department for decades.
New brooms, indeed.