When inclement weather wreaked havoc in Joburg and its surrounds late last year and storm water raged through streets and homes, the parlous state of infrastructure in South Africa’s most populous city was put on stark display.
The word “crumbling” may offer the metro too much credit — rather, Joburg’s water, sanitation, electricity and road networks are broken. Take water: as the rains poured down, the council implemented level 1 water restrictions. Reservoirs had run dry as a result of stage 6 load-shedding, leaving pipes dry in higher-lying areas. One such area is Melville.
“I had to truck water in from Helderkruin where I live,” says Melissa Butner, a Melville-based hairdresser.
She had to haul at least 200l of water a day in her Mini to continue serving clients and keep her business open. (Butner has three employees who rely on the salon for their livelihoods.)
All told, the DA-led multiparty governing coalition is sitting with a R300bn infrastructure backlog, by executive mayor Mpho Phalatse’s estimate. That’s no small change, given the city’s R79bn budget for the current fiscal year — with only R7.7bn allocated to capital (infrastructure) spending.
At that rate, it will take about 39 years to deal with the backlog, assuming there are no additional infrastructure needs along the way — an unlikely scenario.
Added to the infrastructure backlog is uncertainty around revenue collection.
“Our main sources of revenue have been reduced over the years — namely municipal accounts, grants [from national and provincial governments] and loans,” Phalatse tells the FM.
Then, in late September, the political clouds rolled in. In true Julius Caesar style, some of the DA’s own coalition partners turned on Phalatse, voting against her in a no-confidence motion. By late October — and after a high court judgment in the DA’s favour — Phalatse was back in power, only to find herself steering the city through the natural storms less than a month later.
Why is the DA-led coalition — in power, on and off, since 2016 — struggling to turn a corner on basic service delivery? After all, Helen Zille’s 2006 coalition got it right in Cape Town.
“The context for the two cities is different, the comparison unfair and wrong,” says Phalatse. “To suggest that Cape Town was ‘fixed’ quicker is simplistic at best and misleading at worst. Our governments do not enjoy the same level of political stability. Nor has the multiparty coalition [in Joburg] been afforded adequate time to turn around the city.”
It’s a sentiment Zille shares. “Joburg is far more broken after 30 years of ANC rule,” she tells the FM. “When I took over in Cape Town, the ANC hadn’t even been in power [in the metro] for 10 years.”
One possible reason for the turnaround in Cape Town almost two decades ago has to do with the mindset of municipal officials.
“In Cape Town, the administration was far more positively inclined towards the DA than Joburg’s administration today,” says Susan Booysen, director of research at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection and emeritus professor at Wits University. “The ANC has a big hold on the administration of Joburg through cadre deployment.”
Zille, too, points to the broader city administration. “There were good public servants in Cape Town and the ANC hadn’t captured the officialdom yet,” she says.
For the ANC, Joburg remains the prize. The party “hasn’t lost any hope of returning to power in Joburg”, says Booysen. “It’s still the biggest party in the council. I don’t think it’s a nice opposition to have.”
But it’s not just the ANC’s hunger for power in the metro that is making it difficult for Phalatse to rejuvenate the city. Booysen says the political dynamics have also changed since the DA won Cape Town in 2006. While it was easier to whip smaller parties into line in Cape Town’s coalition caucus, the same cannot be said of Joburg today. That much was clear when Phalatse was booted out in late September.
“Today, smaller parties take the chance [of being part of a coalition] to establish themselves,” says Booysen. “It’s totally different from when the DA took over in Cape Town.”
As Zille points out, the DA in Joburg is in “a minority coalition with more challenging partners”. By way of example, she points to the ongoing process of appointing a permanent municipal manager. “You can’t run a city without a permanent and independent municipal manager,” she says, adding that the process has been frustrated by smaller partners for a while now.
Still, the DA-led coalition appointed or renewed the contracts of directors in the metro’s 13 municipal entities (though many CEO positions in these agencies remain vacant).
There is, says Phalatse, a further point of difference between Joburg and Cape Town. “The size of our population and the socioeconomic environment is different,” she says. “Joburg services more than 6-million residents with a high rate of inward migration confounding our challenges.”
Anyone who can commit to quick fixes for Joburg is either lying or unaware of what it takes to turn around a city that has been neglected and looted for so long
— Mpho Phalatse
The city at the centre of South Africa’s economy can surely not be allowed to fall to ruin. But how can it be fixed?
“Anyone who can commit to quick fixes for Joburg is either lying or unaware of what it takes to turn around a city that has been neglected and looted for so long,” says Phalatse.
Electricity provision
The perilous state of City Power’s distribution network has seen the electricity agency attract R1.2bn in capital funding for the fiscal year to end-June.
A large proportion of this will go towards the refurbishment and upgrade of ageing and ailing electricity substations across the city, according to budgetary documents. But it isn’t clear whether the R1.2bn will be enough to reduce unstable power supply — particularly given Eskom’s persistent rolling blackouts.
Still, it’s a drop in the ocean, given that Phalatse said in May that City Power will need R26bn to refurbish its distribution network.
Says Tracy Ledger, head of the energy transition programme at the Public Affairs Research Institute: “The city’s infrastructure is old and has not been properly maintained or upgraded for the past 30 years. This means that it breaks down easily, particularly in times of high levels of load-shedding.
“The answer isn’t just: ‘Well, get them to fix it.’ The amount of money and resources required to do that is enormous and the city just doesn’t have the money. No amount of ‘political will’ is going to magically address the problem.”
Money is a serious issue. The metro has effectively budgeted R1.2bn in capital funding and R1.6bn for operations for an entity that brings in R21.3bn (through sales to commercial and residential customers). That’s more than 30% of the city’s total revenue.
The coalition has, however, managed to put in place a permanent City Power CEO. Tshifularo Mashava was appointed in August after acting in the position for six months. She started off at Eskom in 1999 and has 13 years’ experience in the energy sector, Phalatse said at the time of her appointment.
That should come in handy while Mashava looks to add up to 500MW to Joburg’s grid from independent power producers. This, says Phalatse, will set “Joburg on a path towards mitigating and eventually ending rolling blackouts”.
It’s a move from the DA’s Cape Town playbook. In September, the Cape metro published tenders for the procurement of 200MW of electricity from within its electricity supply area, mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said at the time. Construction of a 7MW solar photovoltaic plant in Atlantis, north of Cape Town, will also start this year, feeding electricity into the Cape Town grid on completion.
Meanwhile, Mashava and City Power have started to move on buying in electricity. In November the agency issued a tender to procure electricity from embedded generators with excess capacity. The tender, which will close in early February, calls for the supply of at least 1MW of electricity over a three-year period. Successful bidders will have between 24 and 30 months to connect to the grid after signing a power purchase agreement.
Water and sanitation
The mid-January heatwave happened to coincide with stage 6 load-shedding. In scenes reminiscent of those in October, the city’s reservoirs ran dry or reached critically low levels.
On January 16, Johannesburg Water reiterated that customers should observe level 1 water restrictions. That came as the primary sources of the city’s water supply, such as the Vaal Dam, were at full capacity, according to the national department of water & sanitation.
Johannesburg Water is allocated a capital budget of R930m in the current fiscal year, down from an adjusted R1.1bn the previous period, according to the metro’s budget documents. In the next financial year, this allocation will drop to R908m.
Of this, R595m is allocated to water services. One of the largest budget items is the refurbishment of the Brixton reservoir which supplies water to, among other businesses, Butner’s shop. A total of R38.4m is pencilled in to add more than 4Ml of capacity. And, according to Phalatse, the metro has already made some strides in water services since the coalition took over.
“A new 15Ml water reservoir now services Lenasia and surrounds,” she says. “Respectively, more than 100km of water and sewer piping has been replaced across the city.”
Water and electricity infrastructures remain vulnerable, however. “We have faced some headwinds in these areas,” Phalatse says. “For instance, the extended and continued rolling blackouts open our network to theft and vandalism — it limits our time for maintenance and repair, putting added stress on the network.”
The weather also didn’t do the metro any favours. “The torrential rains and floods have left serious damage to infrastructure, adding to the already huge backlog.”
Roads
As for the situation at the Joburg Roads Agency (JRA) — well, information has been dripping in as the entity tries to save face after the August appointment of a new CEO.
The only update on JRA CEO “Dr” Tshepo Mahanuke, for example, is in a recent statement from agency chair Thabo Motloung. Mahanuke was put on special leave late last year and suspended this month.
According to Motloung, the preliminary findings of a “re-authentication report” into whether Mahanuke misled the agency when listing his qualifications have been handed to a firm of attorneys. That means the board is not in a position to make public those findings, he said.
But, he added: “The legal counsel has committed to stringent timelines which will ensure a speedy finalisation of this matter.”
On the financial side, the JRA’s total capital budget is about R1.1bn for the present financial year; R100m of this has been allocated for resurfacing roads — including the repair of the ubiquitous potholes.
A lot of money will be needed to plug that particular hole. A report by Africa Check in late November 2020 noted that the JRA put the number of potholes in Joburg at 48,000. The metro’s 2019/2020 integrated development plan review, however, estimated that there were as many as 100,000, according to the fact-checking outfit.
Other big-ticket budget items include installation of new traffic lights (R10m), tarring of gravel roads, construction and upgrades in Orange Farm (R83m) and Diepsloot West (R30m), and renewal of vehicle and pedestrian bridges (R55m).
“If policymakers keep insisting that cities must somehow find the money to fix existing infrastructure from charging higher fees for municipal services, then these issues will only get worse
— Tracy Ledger
Finding the funds
The coalition government’s Herculean task to “repair and rebuild” needs money — and a lot of it.
Given the R300bn infrastructure backlog, “it is about allocating resources strategically and ensuring that the work is done”, says Phalatse. “A lot of Joburg’s infrastructure has passed its useful life hence the largest capital, and repair and maintenance budgets, went to electricity (City Power), roads (the JRA) and water and sewerage (Joburg Water), to stabilise these areas.”
Ledger isn’t convinced that current local government funding models will be sufficient to address the backlog.
“There is no way [the city] can raise that kind of money through increasing rates and taxes or service charges, since a large number of households in the city cannot afford to pay the current costs,” she says. “And this is where one of the main problems is to be found: a city like Joburg is required to raise almost all of its operating expenditure (which includes maintenance and repairs) from charging for services and property taxes.
“We must remember that around a quarter of households live below the food poverty line — total monthly household income is not enough to buy a basic basket of food. Clearly these households will find it very difficult to pay. Many more households are not in complete poverty but are struggling to cope with rapidly increasing prices of food, petrol and electricity.”
It means that a rethink of the funding model for local government is needed.
“Of course we need to address corruption, but we also need to find alternative funding solutions for the infrastructure maintenance backlog — which is a problem in all municipalities,” says Ledger. “If policymakers keep insisting that cities must somehow find the money to fix existing infrastructure from charging higher fees for municipal services, then these issues will only get worse.”
Meanwhile, Joburg’s governing coalition is tackling the workplace culture among the city’s civil servants.
“With a staff complement of around 36,000, Joburg is a massive ship that will take time to turn around, but rest assured we’re doing so,” says Phalatse. “We are changing the culture of the organisation, professionalising and ensuring that people are appointed in the positions they are qualified and skilled for.”
Unlike a highveld thunderstorm, this is no quick affair, and Phalatse calls for patience from the city’s residents.
“The neglect of infrastructure maintenance is far deeper and the backlog is far greater than in Cape Town,” says Phalatse. “Yet we can neither be despondent nor discouraged because of the magnitude of our challenges. We remain optimistic that Joburg remains a city of golden opportunities.”
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