Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city, is struggling to perform basic functions such as providing clean water and electricity, maintaining roads, and ensuring citizen safety. The city's problems include deteriorating financial controls, a swelling wage bill, unstable coalitions, and rapid mayoral turnover. According to Ivor Chipkin, a researcher who has focused on post-apartheid South Africa's governance challenges, the conventional diagnosis of poor governance and weak leadership is insufficient.
Chipkin argues that the deeper problem is institutional and legal, with the city administration existing only in name and all power lying with the council. The city manager has no inherent authority to hire staff or make operational decisions. This has led to a hybrid arrangement where utilities are expected to operate like businesses but are not autonomous enough to protect their operations.
Johannesburg's utilities, including City Power, Johannesburg Water, and Pikitup, were established as corporatised entities to provide services such as electricity, water, and waste management. However, their relationship with the city administration has been unclear, leading to fragmented responsibility and instability. The Municipal Systems Act of 2000 created the position of municipal manager, but it did not provide a clean separation between political direction and administrative authority.
The coalition period, which began in 2016, has further weakened the administrative space, with the city often divided between coalition partners who treat departments or entities as personal areas of influence. This has resulted in the conversion of municipal institutions into political assets, with utilities becoming sites of patronage, rent extraction, and factional control.
Medellín, Colombia's second-largest city, offers a useful point of reference for Johannesburg. In the 1980s and 1990s, Medellín was known as the most violent city in the world, but by 2013, it had become recognised as the most innovative. The city's recovery required the restoration of public authority in areas where powerful criminal and armed cartels had displaced the state.
The municipal utility, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, played a central role in Medellín's recovery, supplying electricity, water, sanitation, and telecommunications while generating revenue and maintaining infrastructure. Chipkin argues that Johannesburg's utilities can be part of the city's renewal if they have shareholder compacts with the city, billing and treasury rules, performance targets, and protection from political interference.
To fix its problems, Johannesburg now has to decide whether its utilities will be used for rebuilding the city and whether it is prepared to confront the political and criminal networks that will resist this. The city's recovery will depend on applying a similar approach to Medellín's, giving its utilities real operational autonomy and combining security, investment, and capable utilities.
Key points
- Johannesburg can learn from Medellín's experience by giving its utilities real operational autonomy.
- The city's utilities must have shareholder compacts, billing and treasury rules, performance targets, and protection from political interference.
- Johannesburg's recovery will depend on combining security, investment, and capable utilities.
