Johannesburg's 220bn Rand Backlog Casts Shadow Over South Africa's Local Vote

Johannesburg has admitted to a 220bn rand (£9.9bn) infrastructure spending backlog, one week before up to 29 million South African voters go to the polls in local elections defined by rubbish-strewn streets, power cuts and potholes.

In Alexandra township, pavements and roads were filled with piles of rubbish rotting in the heat. At the Jukskei River, whose banks are choked with rubble and litter, foul-smelling brown water flowed out of a culvert. The elections on 4 November cover the country's 257 municipalities, most of them in trouble: in the 2024-25 financial year, only 39 local governments — 15% of the total — received a "clean" audit from the auditor general. A parliamentary budget office report found two-thirds are "financially distressed".

What do residents say is failing?

"We've got way too many challenges," said Semadi Manganye, chief executive of Alexandra Water Warriors, an environmental NGO that cleans up the river and plants trees on its banks. "If it's not electricity, it's water. If it's not water, it's waste."

Manganye acknowledged the difficulty of serving a city whose population grew 10% to 4.8 million between the 2011 and 2022 censuses. "I have an understanding of why they're failing," he said. "But we've got to mitigate against this – we knew that it was going to happen."

At a public meeting in Rabie Ridge, a township in the city's north-east, about 400 people berated mayor Dada Morero and executives from the city electricity utility, City Power. One woman said she had had no power for six months. Another said her mother turned to loan sharks after receiving energy bills as high as 6,000 rand a month against a 2,000 rand monthly pension.

"If there is any organisation that is dysfunctional it is this organisation … it is failing," one man said, drawing huge cheers.

The crisis isn't confined to poor areas. Parts of Melville and Westdene, affluent northern suburbs, have had unpredictable water supply since September, after a month-long outage roughly six months ago. "The word I'd use is desperate, because literally there's been almost no water at all," said Kate Spiller, a semi-retired management consultant. "During the day, there's drips and drabs. And then sometimes in the middle of night, my husband's been able to fill a couple of five-litre bottles and then it's gone dry again."

Spiller and her husband drive 10 minutes almost daily to a mosque with a borehole to fill about a dozen five-litre bottles for bucket showers. "It's incapacitating … you're always planning, you're always thinking: 'We need to get water, we'd better make a plan,'" she said.

How did the city get here?

Johannesburg, South Africa's commercial capital, has had 10 changes of mayor in the past decade under a series of unstable coalitions. A quarter of the water bought by the municipal body Johannesburg Water is estimated to be lost to leaks.

"Overall, Johannesburg is providing the necessary services to our communities," Morero said in an interview after the Rabie Ridge meeting. "Isolated areas where they don't have [services], we are focusing on right now." He admitted parts of the inner city lacked power due to a "collapsed" substation, blaming "vandalism" and criminal syndicates that "are organised and affecting our infrastructure".

Experts point the finger at the city itself. An October report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime stated: "Governance failure in the CoJ has given birth to a criminal ecosystem." "People in charge of the supply chain system can easily get backhanders," said Rashid Seedat, a former city official who heads the Gauteng City-Region Observatory. "Of course, corruption is the metro police officer taking a bribe of 200 rand [and] a 200m rand tender. It's across the board and endemic in the entire system and acceptable."

Could the elections change control of the city?

The Democratic Alliance, the country's second-largest party, has campaigned hard under 75-year-old former Cape Town mayor Helen Zille to unseat the ANC and its coalition partners, the far-left EFF and the populist Patriotic Alliance. Zille, who is white, has caused controversy among black voters, including 2017 tweets saying colonialism was not completely negative. But viral stunts — Zille snorkelling in an enormous flooded pothole among them — have helped put the DA ahead: it polled between 29% and 36% in October, against 22% to 27% for the ANC, which is fielding three possible mayoral candidates amid factional infighting. Voters choose parties and councillors, who in turn elect the mayor.

That lead may not be enough. "In order to understand Joburg, you actually have to zoom out a bit and look at all of Gauteng," said Ziyanda Stuurman of Africa Practice, a consultancy. She described a decade-long working relationship between the ANC, EFF and ActionSA across Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, with the EFF backing ANC and ActionSA mayors in all three cities.

A repeat coalition could mean five more years of decline, Stuurman said: "It's been much more horse-trading than it actually has been about the city's best interests."