Johannesburg's collapse, capture, corruption is a national risk, President to hear

President Cyril Ramaphosa will continue his visit to Johannesburg on Friday, 7 March, ahead of a national plan to fix the city, which civil society leaders say is collapsing.

The head of state will spend Friday in the City of Johannesburg’s Connie Bapela Council Chamber listening to business, labour and civil society leaders, as well as mayor Dada Morero and his team, speak about what ails South Africa’s largest city and what can be done to fix it.

The latest Auditor-General report on Johannesburg shows that it lost R11.1-billion in irregular expenditure for 2022/23, R1.1-billion in fruitless and wasteful expenditure and R9.6-billion in unauthorised expenditure. The total of R21.8-billion is a sizeable proportion of the city’s estimated R83-billion budget.

Johannesburg will get an intergovernmental team similar to the one lifting Durban’s eThekwini council from its malaise.

Read more: ‘Not a pleasing environment’ — Ramaphosa says Joburg must fix its many problems, and fast

“We are seeing great progress in eThekwini as we implement the district development model, which enables all key role-players in government, business, labour and community-based organisations to work together. We will expand our support to municipalities that require assistance, drawing on the lessons of the Presidential eThekwini Working Group,” said Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation address in February.

Johannesburg inner-city clean-up by Jozi My Jozi as part of Mandela Day. (Photos: Justin Lee)

City in crisis

Johannesburg has suffered five infrastructure Day Zero equivalents, which were generalised and wide water cuts, in the past year. A Daily Maverick data survey has shown hundreds of reported power cuts every month.

The Johannesburg Roads Agency has found that 80% of the city’s 902 bridges are in poor to very poor condition because of a lack of maintenance, while there are thousands of potholes across the city of more than five million people. Homeless people direct traffic at intersections where traffic lights don’t work.

Despite being a wealthy city, there is no viable plan to comfort the growing legion of homeless people or the waste recyclers who do an admirable job of ensuring that landfills do not become another urban environmental crisis.

“It’s a city suffering from collapse, corruption and capture,” said Neeshan Bolton of the Johannesburg Crisis Alliance of civic organisations, which has held six summits to diagnose the problems and get citizens active.

“This [city] is the heartbeat of the economy and the country’s financial and industrial heartland,” he said, adding that Ramaphosa’s visit could be meaningful if it resulted in action.

“The President has seen what is happening as he lives here and the collapse of Johannesburg has national implications. In the ’70s and ’80s, we learnt that when Johannesburg erupts [in protests], it spreads nationally,” said Bolton, referring to the protests at schools in Soweto in the 1970s and in communities across the city in the 1980s.

Bolton said the Crisis Alliance would tell Ramaphosa its 10-minute allocation to speak on Friday was not sufficient to tell the full story and that it wanted a longer presidential audience.

“We will hand over the outcomes of six summits to show the collapse is not confined to an area but to all 135 wards which are experiencing various stages of collapse. No part of the city is spared.”

Calls for overhaul

The Crisis Alliance wants a reconfiguration of how Johannesburg is run. The city is managed by a neoliberal, quasi-privatisation model where all services are “outsourced” to city entities which are accountable to boards filled with deployed cadres from all parties in the governing coalition. It is the only metropolitan council configured in this way.

The DA’s caucus head in the city, Belinda Echeozonjoku, said she welcomed the meeting with Ramaphosa.

“The President must see that the DA is not just making a noise. He needs to make more unannounced visits. Cadre deployment is collapsing service delivery,” she said.

After the Auditor-General report was tabled at the council, the DA called for lifestyle audits of all city managers and entity board members. Echeozonjoku charged that the city administration had been compromised and politicised.

The city’s water warrior Dr Ferrial Adam, the executive director of WaterCAN, said that while water cuts had abated since December, she still felt the “politicians sing and dance while Rome burns”.

The city failed to pass an urgent adjustment budget on 27 February, which would have allocated more money to failing water infrastructure, said Adam, who questioned why a R30-million allocation to fix wastewater treatment works was being diverted. She said the city’s water system needed between R2.5-billion and R3-billion for urgent repairs this year.

Government intervention

An official with knowledge of the plans, who spoke anonymously because he does not have permission to be quoted, said the Presidency would use the means at its disposal in the intergovernmental relations framework to push for reforms.

“The jury is still out on whether or not this works,” he said, explaining that political factions and patronage networks may obstruct reforms needed to fix the city.

In eThekwini, Mike Mabuyakhulu (a member of the ANC’s provincial task team) spearheads reforms to improve municipal governance. In Johannesburg, the executive mayor, Dada Morero, is finally moving ahead with a city clean-up at scale because he has been given the political space to do so, say activists.

Visible repairs and clean-ups are happening in Johannesburg, on the routes that G20 foreign ministers and their entourages took late in February and also in the inner city.

The business-led and citizen-supported Jozi my Jozi initiative is an asset that could help if it works closely with the presidential working group. The initiative, led by Bea Swanepoel and Dawn Robertson, has already ensured that the Nelson Mandela Bridge has been lit again and fixed, and that 10 gateways (entry points) have been improved. See this report.

What the Auditor-General’s report says about the risks facing Johannesburg:

Key risks 

• The city’s employees are not capable, productive or effective in managing the complexity of the city’s issues.


• The city’s water and electricity infrastructure may deteriorate to such an extent that short- and long-term demands cannot be met.


• The city’s assets are stolen, vandalised, hijacked, fall into disrepair,  become obsolete or are not used effectively.


• The city’s financial position may not improve to the point where it can pay creditors on time, with a two-month credit availability factor.


• The city’s resources are stolen, or inappropriately/ fraudulently utilised for the gain of suppliers and employees and not in the best interest of the city’s citizens.

Other risks

• Ineffective procurement and contract management.


• Cybersecurity risks.


• Erosion of the local natural environment (direct human and industrial activity). DM