Picture the scene: you’re driving to work in Johannesburg, and the traffic lights on the major artery William Nicol Drive – like on most roads in the city – are not working.
Then you spot a homeless person in a neon jacket directing the many lanes of cars with great skill. He’s keeping the traffic flowing, even if a little slower than had the lights been working.
“Ah, thank goodness he’s here again,” you think, “or I might have lost my mind in this traffic.”
You immediately remember with a sombre heart that you’re experiencing one of the great city’s huge ironies: that its most destitute residents are stepping in to save middle-class motorists from inconvenience.
Sure, they might get more tips from this than from begging, but they do it with pride and even skill, a testament to their potential. On one level, the experience is heartwarming: on another, it’s tragic. You drive on.
The experience described above is one that drivers in Johannesburg have almost daily. It tells of Johannesburg’s people’s enormous creativity and good humour. It also encapsulates the infrastructure decay that has businesspeople, and indeed all people in Johannesburg, extremely alarmed.
Its people might be keeping the city going to a large degree, but is this sustainable?
Extent of the decay
Water scarcity, due to crumbling infrastructure, is the gravest risk facing both residents and the economy, as homes and businesses simply cannot function without water.
The city’s electricity security has improved greatly due to the first phase of Operation Vulindlela’s success in boosting the renewable energy supply. Nonetheless, the decay in other aspects of the city’s infrastructure is so bad that civic, business, and political leaders paint a sobering picture of whether it can be fixed.
Most areas of Johannesburg experience water shortages at least a few times a year, some several times monthly, sometimes for days or weeks at a time.
Almost half of all water supplied – 46%, precisely – is lost through leaks and infrastructure failures, and the city faces a R27 billion backlog in fixing water infrastructure.
Roads, too, are in an appalling state. An estimated R16 billion is needed to restore the city’s crumbling road network. Johannesburg has 1,592 bridges, but only 8% are in good condition, to the extent that the transport department’s own engineers choose not to drive over some others.
“Ah, thank goodness he’s here again,” you think, “or I might have lost my mind in this traffic.”
“There are potholes on every street in the city,” observed Johannesburger Danny, known to Dolphin Bay. “We and the other residents in our road fixed a big pothole ourselves six years ago because Johannesburg Water didn’t come and repair the road after they had dug it up. They just left it there, with the red and white ribbons around it, for ages.”
Experts and officials agree that the infrastructure crisis is largely self-inflicted, stemming from years of municipal mismanagement and underinvestment.
A crisis of leadership
There are pockets of Johannesburg where things work, Danny points out. She describes the Roosevelt Park Community Centre, where she takes part in a needlework group, as a roaring success due to the “strict, old-school” leadership of the woman who runs it.
“People of all shapes, colours, sizes, and abilities come here. There are little kids on Saturday doing gym, there’s a lace guild, there are exercise classes. The woman in charge ropes in the insurance company and the City to fix the building when it breaks, and the groups that meet here contribute to buy a printer, or feed the cat, Ginger, for instance. This is an example of a community working together, and the reason we do it is her leadership.
“There are residential areas that work like that too, where the city councillors work very hard and are available to the community. But these are exceptions to the far bigger rule. We are experiencing a failure of the political class, and the failure of voters to vote for an effective government.”
Esteemed journalist Ferial Haffajee has described the city as being “run by WhatsApp groups” who lobby for and insist on the city authorities doing their jobs, where they can.
An embarrassed president
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is evidently embarrassed by the state of Johannesburg, and anxious about the impression it will give when world leaders gather in the city for the G20 meeting – which United States President Donald Trump has confirmed he will be attending – in November 2025.
In early March, Ramaphosa announced plans to arrest the city’s decline under Operation Vulindlela 2 (OV2), which focuses on reforming municipalities and improving local government service delivery, including water, electricity, and transport infrastructure.
Business leaders have praised OV1 for its success in improving national electricity security and have high hopes for OV2.
Also in March, Ramaphosa announced the launch of the Presidential Johannesburg Working Group, tasked with accelerating Johannesburg’s turnaround, which reports regularly to the president. This group includes representatives from national government, Gauteng province, the City of Johannesburg, business, labour, civil society, and academia.
Can these measures work? There have been some changes in two months: the inner city is cleaner, as it’s the region where the experiment started.
Yet many residents are sceptical. “The Working Group? It’s yet another meeting in yet another fancy hotel. We need real action, not just even more talk,” one told us.
Looking for nuance
The consensus is that with all the political will possible, it would take many years to fix Johannesburg. Reading between the lines, it is not impossible.
The budget shortfalls listed in news reports may engender despair: for example, while R3 billion is needed every year to fix water infrastructure alone, only R1,2 billion has been budgeted this financial year.
But the picture is more complex than that. As senior researchers at the Public Affairs Research Institute have pointed out, there is vast amounts of wasteful expenditure in the city, allocated to line items such as extravagant lunches for councillors. The city’s crumbling water infrastructure is due to poor prioritisation, not lack of funds, they say.
Other commentators remind us that local government elections in 2026 may shift things. The ANC won only 34% of the votes in the last elections in its heartland province of Gauteng, now governing in a coalition that is clearly dysfunctional.
A different balance of power could bring about change, as the opposition Democratic Alliance is at pains to emphasise.
Researchers point out that there is vast amounts of wasteful expenditure in the city. The city’s crumbling water infrastructure is due to poor prioritisation, not lack of funds, they say.
The Dolphin Bay Brief interviewed Shameela Soobramoney, CEO of the National Business Initiative, on the issue. The NBI had told us that “initial conversations” have begun about the prospect of it helping the City through the NBI’s TAMDEV (Technical Assistance, Mentorship & Development) programme. This deploys retired experts from both the private and public sectors to mentor and upskill senior civil servants, and to give technical help to unblock important projects.
“Various municipalities across the country have benefitted from this support and we are hoping to also extend it to the City of Johannesburg, when called to do so,” Shameela said.
The goal is to strengthen the state’s ability to improve service delivery and create jobs.
The NBI explains that it is apolitical and works with the democratically elected government. Its focus is not on the political leadership but to strengthen the public service, and government’s own budgeted funds are used.
We keenly await developments.
As Danny sums up: “We need proper and courageous leadership. Political in-fighting doesn’t help.”
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