This year’s event may have started with a bang, but #CEOSleepout has become the most successful goodwill drive on the continent, says Kevin Ritchie.
Johannesburg - It started with a bang, literally, as metro cops fired rubber bullets to stop an abortive EFF march in its tracks on Thursday night.
Then at least two attendees were mugged as they made there way onto Johannesburg’s iconic Mandela bridge, but by 6pm the 2016 iteration of the CEO SleepOut was well underway, having moved from Millionaires’ Row outside the Joburg Stock Exchange in Sandton last year to the gritty frontier of the inner city.
The second edition of this charity drive in aid of the homeless, which began in Australia, drew many times more people as CEOs brought along three person teams of colleagues, students and pupils, for a team entry fee of R180 000 and armfuls of donations on the night.
By 9pm on Thursday, the drive had beaten the inaugural record of R28 million, with R31 million pledged, R9 million short of charity founder Ali Gregg’s target to her team, but entrenching the initiative as the most successful goodwill drive on the continent.
Gauteng Premier David Makhura, attending his second SleepOut, spent the early part of the evening travelling the CBD, first to CityKids, an inner city pre- and primary school in Mooi Street, where the children, mostly from poor families themselves, had filled a room with groceries to give to the homeless, over and above the money they regularly raise for Choc, the foundation for children with cancer.
To them, Makhura said: “Sharing is caring. When you do this you are building the South Africa of Nelson Mandela.”
From there, past pavements of homeless people under blankets all along the east end of Pritchard Street, with some standing around blazing braziers, it was onto Doornfontein where University of Johannesburg students had organised a soup kitchen and SleepOut for the actual homeless.
Makhura kept to his theme as he told them: “we want to build a country where everyone matters, where no one is homeless. You came here to the city wanting a better life not wanting to sleep under the bridge.”
For radio host Ashraf Garda, the message he received was stark: Joburg is nie Goudstad nie, dis KakStad, (Joburg isn’t the city of gold, it the city of shit),” said one man who’d come up from Cape Town to work 15 years before only to spend the next 14 and a half on the streets.
Garda’s colleague, TV host Leanne Manas, had a warmer reception: “Are you really sleeping out tonight?” a homeless person asked her.
When she told him he was, he said: “Leanne, thank you.”
From Doornfontein, it was onto Kingsmead College in Rosebank, where pupils were sleeping out in solidarity. Earlier they’d made more than 200 sleeping bags out of plastic bags and newspapers to give to the homeless. Some of the pupils were using them to sleep in that night.
Makhura told them they were embodying the spirit of Madiba; “you can’t close your eyes to the suffering of other human beings. We must build a country where the homeless have a home, but this was neither the responsibility solely of government or of the CEOs, but of the youth themselves. Don’t expect your parents to do it either,” he said, “you must do it.”
There were other sympathy sleepouts across the city in company offices from Rivonia to Braamfontein, back at the bridge some of the more than 800 people were preparing to sleep or see the night out talking to each other.
The donations they had brought onto the bridge allowed them tokens to purchase a piece of cardboard to sleep on and more cardboard for a rudimentary shelter above them. They’d been able to buy a sleeping bag and a cup of soup, or even a coffee.
Now though, all the “shops” on the bridge were closed, they’d only open again just before dawn.
By 5am it was cold, unbearably cold. The bridge looked like the aftermath of a natural disaster, bodies on cardboard the length and breadth, with die-hards huddled around braziers. There was no glitz or glamour, the multi-coloured lights of the bridge provided no warmth.
At 5.45am the CEOs and their teams were drawn to the stage for some final words.
They were told they would leave as they had arrived – with nothing, leaving the sleeping bags, the metal cups, plates, the cardboard, even the corrugated iron huts which had served as shops behind to be donated to the actual homeless.
Across the way in a little park opposite the taxi rank Gift of the Givers was setting up a soup kitchen for 1000 inner city homeless to get breakfast and then to receive a set of clothes, a blanket, a sleeping bag and a book on the bridge courtesy of the SleepOut and The Star’s Operation Snowball.
As Makhura bade the CEOs farewell, he told them: “Ignore the critics, you’ve made a statement tonight that homeless people exist. We have moved beyond a CEO SleepOut to a movement for good by bringing in the youth and the associated sympathy sleep outs across the city.”
And then former human settlements minister Tokyo Sexwale stole the show.
“I’m hosting the SleepOut next year, we’re doing it on Mandela Day – and we’re doing it on Robben Island. I’ll see you there.”
* Kevin Ritchie is editor of The Star.