|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Janine Erasmus
First published on News24
In Nerina Street, Randburg, City of Johannesburg (CoJ), lies the site of a water burst that has been excavated and left open for at least two years. The repair job was never completed – piles of sand extend into the pothole-ridden road, forcing cars to swerve around it into oncoming traffic, and a contented community of plants has had ample time to establish itself in the open hole. This eyesore and traffic hazard has been reported over and over, even to the ward councillor (by this writer in March 2025), and the matter was escalated. Yet there it still stands, untended and forgotten.
Similar situation everywhere
This situation is repeated all over the city, and it is symptomatic of the CoJ’s steady decline in recent years. Its tagline – A world-class African city – is almost laughable in the face of years-long political instability, hydra-like water leaks, uncountable potholes, traffic lights that don’t work, and other challenges, such as frequent power interruptions, which still happen largely because infrastructure is dilapidated or tampered with.
Coalition politics and infighting seem to dominate the governance landscape, rather than a focus on serving the city’s residents, while the Auditor-General consistently documents substandard quality of submitted financial statements, poor consequence management, procurement irregularities, questionable contract management, and more than R90 billion worth of irregular, fruitless, and wasteful expenditure in the 2023/2024 financial year alone.
What is the solution?
Corruption at the CoJ is also deeply entrenched and is following established patterns of state capture, say observers.
But Johannesburg, as South Africa’s most populous city and its economic and financial heart, cannot afford to collapse. If the City’s management is unable, or unwilling, to sort these issues out, can business step in? Should business step in? And what would such a partnership look like?
Solution or salve?
Business leaders in the city have conditionally offered their services to develop and implement solutions for some of the myriad challenges, along the lines of the current Government-Business Partnership, which has helped put Eskom and Transnet into a better operational state.
They are not, however, prepared to work with partners who do not prioritise the City’s interests, stipulating that there must be a structure in place that is “capable of governing scrupulously, delivering for the City, and being held to account”. Naturally, as business, they are insistent that City management must stabilise the finances, be transparent about how these are budgeted for and spent, and implement meaningful consequences for corruption. These conditions, and more, must be set out in black and white before any work begins.
But such a private-public partnership, on this kind of scale, brings its own vulnerabilities. We have seen how procurement pipelines have been, and are being ruthlessly exploited, how opacity has enabled unchecked malfeasance, how business has been complicit in corrupt practices. Without rigorous transparency and thorough due diligence, we might find ourselves in the same situation of elite capture we have seen before – but reversed.
Business as a catalyst, not substitute
And we must ask ourselves: Will this merely let politicians off the hook? It might break the cycle of neglect, but it might also entrench the culture of no accountability, create a dependency on business to save the day, and ease the pressure for real systemic reform. We saw the latter for a period after load shedding was lessened, although that public fury has now transferred to the current water supply fiasco.
Therefore, we need accountability structures to be used consistently and effectively – public reporting of matters affecting communities, resident oversight of how their money is used, explicit sunset clauses which ensure business involvement does not continue indefinitely, and sustained pressure on the municipal leadership to fix root causes.
Should this plan go ahead, Corruption Watch cautions against complacency from both the public and the politicians. We cannot ease up on the pressure for accountability. We cannot have a scenario playing out in Johannesburg of improved infrastructure, cleaner and pothole-free streets, water and power in every home, and functioning billing systems, all delivered by the private sector, while our lacklustre Johannesburg leaders take credit and face reduced electoral consequences for their failures.
Business stepping in is not inherently wrong – but it is vital to remember that such intervention does not absolve City management of their duty to account, nor does it relieve citizens of their duty to demand better from municipal leaders.
This is precisely the moment to use the democratic tool of the vote to enforce accountability, for citizens to carefully consider who gets their nod on 4 November – to think about who failed Johannesburg, who is fixing it, and who should never be trusted with it again.
– Janine Erasmus is the website editor for Corruption Watch.
