Johannesburg, the city that became famous for mining companies digging deep into the bowels of the earth in search of gold, will have to find more than R220bn to upgrade and build roads, electricity and water infrastructure. And this time the city itself will have to dig deep into the pockets of its residents to pay the bills.
Bloomberg reported this week that the city had pegged the cost of fixing its infrastructure at R221bn. There are no details yet on how the city officials arrived at that number.
The report came as the ANC concluded its strategy planning session, during which it identified failures by municipalities to provide socioeconomic services such as water and electricity, as a key explanatory factor behind the party’s electoral losses. The ANC’s national vote in the 2024 election dropped to 40%, a fall of more than 20 percentage points from its performance in 2019.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has been quoted as saying a “national task team”, working with other political parties, will start work this month on stabilising Johannesburg. He hopes these interventions will help “restore, rebuild and renew the ANC”. It seems Luthuli House is banking on this renewal to help the ANC to recover lost ground in the 2026 municipal elections.
The restoration, rebuilding and renewal of the ANC — eh, sorry, I meant Johannesburg — will come at a huge cost for the city’s residents. To pay for all of this, the city will have to mine the pockets of Johannesburg residents. In this too we know some — the northern suburbs, to be specific — will pay substantially more than others. Others simply won’t pay, the townships being a case in point, without any consequences.
There’s no other way. National government coffers are empty, so support through higher conditional grants will be limited. This means residents must pay more for services such as electricity and water.
Funds stolen
The bill for all of this is most likely to be higher than R221bn for several reasons. The city’s capacity for planning and managing expenditure of that magnitude is in doubt. That immediately raises questions about the cost estimates the city used to arrive at the R221bn figure. But even if the number is accurate, the issue of cost overruns and delayed project completions has not been considered, which means the final bill will almost certainly be far higher.
Then there’s corruption. Unless the current crop of politicians and city administrators miraculously disappears, corruption is a certainty. Just as the sun will rise in the east and set in the west, a portion of the funds that are allocated for the upgrade and building of infrastructure will be stolen. The debate is not whether, but how much.
And as is the case with corruption at Eskom now, watch for “rats and mice” being arrested for corruption in the City of Johannesburg. Eskom has been regaling us with regular announcements of “a truck driver” and “a contractor” being arrested. Yet there’s no way a truck driver would swap coal for rocks for his own benefit. Eskom doesn’t pay the driver for the coal load. Eskom has a contract with the driver’s employer (or the truck owner is subcontracted by the coal seller).
So, either the company with which Eskom has a coal contract is the culprit, or a criminal syndicate is responsible. The truck driver is caught in the middle. For sure, he is getting paid something extra to divert the truck from its normal route between the coal mine to an Eskom power station. But the biggest beneficiaries are members of a syndicate, which will most likely include politicians.
And the blame here isn’t entirely Eskom’s. The police and their political masters aren’t too keen to go after the organised crime that’s behind the swapping of coal for rocks and the sabotage of Eskom’s equipment.
Johannesburg can tap the private sector for help in managing or funding some, or most, of the infrastructure upgrades, but that will not be free either.
The city’s politicians and their national counterparts must find a way of convincing the city’s paying residents that the higher cost of rates and taxes they will have to bear well into the future will bring benefits, and those benefits will have to go beyond just the availability of electricity and clean water.
They will have to include a higher standard of living. Otherwise, the paying residents will feel they are being mined for very little benefit to themselves.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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