PREVIEW: Kenny Kunene, with Benjamin Fogel

Welcome to No Gods, No Mayors.

I've never opened the show like that without saying hello before.

I didn't like it.

I'm going to go back to how I usually do.

Yeah, keep it easy.

Am I in trouble?

Are you mad at me?

Have I wronged you in some way, Riley Quinn?

Is this an alarm?

Is this an alarm going out?

Presidential announcement.

Welcome to another episode of No Gods, No Mayors.

Everybody's phone is going off.

It's making a sound you've never heard before.

No Gods, No Mayors is beginning.

And 10, 9,

8.

The lights are flashing.

Just getting more and more confrontational with it.

Just like, listen up, you sack of fuck.

It's no gods, no mayors.

Yeah, we're doing like liberal compound swearing.

That's like, all right.

What's up, fuck knuckle?

Yeah, what's up, fuck knuckle?

We're talking about the mayors.

All right.

Hello, everyone.

It's no gods, no mayors.

That was a little fun opening for you.

Wow.

Great opening, Riley.

Thank you, Maddie.

Now, I have been excited to do this episode for a long time.

I've wanted to get specifically this guest to talk about not just this mayor, but these mayors,

this set of mayors.

And so I would love to introduce our guest, the newly minted Dr.

Ben Fogel.

Ben, how's it going?

It's pretty good.

I mean, I'm in Britain, so as good as I could be.

I could be in South Africa.

Sorry, man.

I'm also sorry that you're in Britain.

Yeah.

Now, I have so much to cover today.

So we are going, I'm going to make an executive decision that item rodeo, as I believe we call the segment.

That's correct.

The rodeo of items is going to have to be postponed until next episode.

However,

I would like to introduce a new opening segment

that's called

the Municipal Office of Corrections and Addendums.

That won't be difficult to to remember.

I want a stamp sound effect right there.

Sam, can we get some errata music, please?

I would like to issue my first municipal correction and addendum, which is that I said addendums as the plural of addendum and not addenda.

Yeah.

So

addenda.

Also, I do want to shout out my friend Sam because.

uh they messaged me to say not only are you saying my name a lot on your podcast but you're also saying it in the form of an instruction, which is very like affronting if I'm listening to the thing.

And then to be told by name,

add some errata music here.

So Sam, you too, go and add some errata music.

Sorry to all Sams who listen to the show.

We're not yelling at you.

And also sorry to Sam, the producer who we are yelling at.

Yeah.

We're yelling at kindly in a sort of, you know, friendly way.

I'm going to try a friendly yell now.

Hey, Sam, try some errata music.

Wow, that sounds so passive aggressive.

I'm sorry, Sam.

I'm sorry.

I'm off my nut to get some errata music.

Please, please come back on this side of the microphone.

Okay, no.

Municipal Office of Corrections and Addenda.

On our Larry Langford episode on the Patreon, a comment was left by a user, Ben, who says

his campaign slogan for the mayor of Birmingham was, let's do something.

But during the let's do something campaign.

Let's do something with an exclamation mark.

That's right.

During the let's do something, which also sounds like you're about to do a thrill kill.

You know what it is?

It sounds like, and this is going to be very, very

esoteric.

A miss show.

It's interesting.

It sounds like the serial killerized version of Fred from Scooby-Doo that they put on the Venture Brothers.

That's not what it sounds like.

What it sounds like is something Dutch Schultz said 96 times before he bled to death.

So, no,

one of the posters of Larry Langford's campaign, the Let's Do Something campaign for the mayor of Birmingham, explains something called the cycle of stupidity.

So step one in the cycle of stupidity is lack of growth in Birmingham.

Step two is lack of vision.

Step three, no zoo expansion.

Step four,

no pre-K programs.

Step five, there's a stat, there's a fifth step that makes it all make sense.

Okay.

No dome.

No dome.

No, no dome.

We're going to see a lot of things, but we ain't going to see no domes.

We ain't going to see a dome.

It's like, if you don't expand the zoo, we're not going to be able to get enough pre-K programs going in order to free up the dome workers from building the dome.

Doing like this is the merch strat, right?

We do one of those hats that's like fish fear me, women fear me ones, except it's like no zoo expansion, no dome.

No dome.

No, no pre-K programs.

No.

I could draw a really straight line.

Why did I express that as fish fear me, women fear me?

That's too real of a hat.

You can't wear that.

I'm scaring the hose.

And by the hose, I mean women.

I also have a correction, Riley, for this part, which is we were corrected by many listeners.

It is not pronounced Mino, it is my not.

Nope, it's Mino.

It's stupid.

I don't respect it.

Yeah,

so I need to issue a correction to their correction and to the pronunciation of that city's name, which is it's Minot now.

Introducing an incorrection.

Yes, that's right.

Enjoying a glass of Mino Grigio.

That's right.

So that was what a wonderful first segment that was.

I want to talk about Johannesburg or Joe Berg or Josie or whatever you want to call it because let's just say we're going to do an episode here.

Look, the title of the episode is named after one mayor, right?

But we're actually talking about many mayors.

Two mayors, perhaps?

No, even more.

Just a mayor parade.

The mayor has five to seven bodies.

We are talking about the period from about 2020 or so in Johannesburg to the present day where they've had like fully more than half the mayors that have ever been mayor of Johannesburg.

Oh, good.

Okay.

Exciting for some quick hits here.

So I want to give some context to Joe Burg first.

I'm going to lean on Ben for this quite a bit, which is that politically, Joe Burg in its current form is like a metropolitan mayor with like a council and then these things called like, what is it, mayoral master committees or an MMC?

Yeah, it's basically like a cabinet for a mayor.

So you allocated positions such as transport, security, housing, and that's basically your mayoral cabinet.

And they are comprised of councillors who are members of Joberg, his

municipal legislature.

Yeah.

And this form of government has been in place since 2000.

So when I say more than half the mayors that Joe Berg has had, I mean in this form of government.

Okay.

So they had one mayor for the first 11 years.

The next one, Parks Tao, is for five years, I believe.

He's the last, the next two are a couple years each.

And the last guide have any, by the way, just before I move on as well, like Johannesburg is the entire economic capital of like all of sub-Saharan or even just all of Africa.

Like it's the most important financial center.

The G20 is going to be there in relatively short order.

Like this is a big, important city, and it is what we're going to learn.

Fucking impossible to govern.

Oh, good.

Fantastic.

Great.

I'm feeling already some

like New York connections in that if you look at list of mayors of Johannesburg, it's going to be like Dutch guy, Dutch guy, Dutch guy, Dutch guy, Anglo guy, Anglo-guy, and then modernity.

It's even more complicated than that.

I mean, many things you can say about Johannesburg, but like basically it's the largest city in the world without a natural body of water.

It's the largest man-made forest in the world.

It's the site of the largest gold reserves ever discovered.

And it's always been a crazy fucking Wild West hustle-die type of city since the beginning, full of grifters, chances, con men, crooks, dreamers, and losers.

Yeah.

It is a city that is that's been crazy the whole time.

What if, what if we built the kind of disproportionate economic importance of the city of London on top of a gold mine?

Yeah, and took away the Thames as well.

So, on the mayors, right?

The final mayor to have anything like a normal length term is a guy called Jeff Makubo.

So he goes from December 2019 to July 2021.

He's also pretty corrupt.

By May 2021, he's testifying before like multiple times of multiple kinds of like municipal corruption we've seen a million times before.

Well, yeah, okay, sure.

But like everybody did some stuff during COVID that we don't remember well.

And when we look back on it, we go, huh, that was kind of insane of us, right?

Like

he did something during COVID, which is, you know, quite notable.

He died of it.

I mean, that is in many ways the craziest thing you can do during covid yeah yeah he's receiving he's receiving kickbacks in heaven now

a guy a guy who um watched bo burnham's inside so much that he died the funny thing is he died like a week before he was due to testify before the commission on state capture so maybe he knew he was so guilty he was just like all right i'm licking doorknobs in hospitals let's go

the mafia sent somebody in a cough on him all i'm gonna say is that uh i'm not gonna allude to anything other than he wasn't the only one who died during that period before they were about to testify.

But that aside.

The mob leaves, like leaves you in a room with a service revolver with one vial of COVID loaded in it.

The mafia sent over Enforcer coughing Jimmy.

Yeah, I'm the mafia plague vector.

Well, if you want a greatest hit from South Africa's COVID campaign, there was a campaign to be banned tobacco, big boost organized crime during early COVID.

And there was an excuse given by the minister: is that when you smoke the zoll, and zol actually means weed in South Africa, you use your split and then you pass it on to somebody else, and that could pass COVID.

And then they did a house remix, which is epic.

Look down with no cigarettes.

So, Jeff, Jeff Makubo, yeah, he sort of conveniently dies of COVID before he's due to testify before the Commission on State Capture.

And then the guy takes over.

For these are all Democratic Alliance mayors.