In December 2020, Joburg mayor Geoff Makhubo summoned the metro’s municipal manager and senior executives to the mayoral parlour in Braamfontein. There, he read them the riot act.
Behind Makhubo was a "resignation box". And for each of those summoned by the mayor, a resignation had been typed up — awaiting only a signature.
"Are you with us, or are you working against us?" he apparently asked. "If you’re working against us, do the honourable thing and resign."
Not one did so, Makhubo says in an interview with the FM. "All of them pledged their loyalty to the city and its people."
It’s a dramatic story — and one he tells as a means of sharing his deep dissatisfaction with the state of service delivery in the city, a year after taking over as mayor after the DA-led coalition fell apart.
It’s also an important one, given the centrality of Joburg to SA’s economy. In his February state of the province address, Gauteng premier David Makhura touched on the city’s importance, calling it "the economic hub of our province and [its] financial nerve".
The metro contributes almost half of the province’s GDP, Makhura says.
The province’s GDP in turn contributes more than a third of SA’s. Joburg alone accounts for about 18% of SA’s economy.
So it has to run like a well-oiled, investment-friendly machine, which requires that it is able to deliver services. On that count, things aren’t looking good.
"I have had it with [the] levels of service," Makhubo says. "I just think we are failing our people. I think we are not doing what the basics should be."
It’s an extraordinary admission by the city’s top politician. But it’s not the first time a member of Joburg’s executive council has said as much — albeit perhaps less bluntly. In February, finance MMC Jolidee Matongo told a public meeting about the city’s rates policy that "services have not been up to scratch".
This unhappiness has culminated in a separation agreement with Ndivhoniswani Lukhwareni, the city manager. (His contract would have expired anyway around the time a new local government is elected in the second half of the year.)
Makhubo is at pains to stress that he did not fire Lukhwareni, though that would seem to be a question of interpretation: the working relationship was clearly already on the skids. In Makhubo’s telling, he’d given Lukhwareni — as the administrative accounting officer for service delivery — about a year to show that he could turn things around. He simply failed to do that, Makhubo says.
But with elections looming, and fed-up residents looking for someone to blame for inadequate delivery, the city manager may just be an easy fall-guy. DA caucus leader Leah Knott said as much recently, noting her concern that Lukhwareni has been made a scapegoat for "corrupt" Covid-19 expenditure, as well as service delivery failings in the city. "In an election year we have to worry that Lukhwareni is being pushed aside to make way for a more compliant cadre who will enable looting so as to fund the campaign of the morally and financially bankrupt ANC," she said.
Makhubo’s response is blunt. Knott, he says, "talks nonsense". He didn’t simply purge officials, he says — it’s just that, a year on, services were not getting better.
In any case, he claims that one of the problems facing the city is that former mayor Herman Mashaba purged people with valuable institutional knowledge.
(Mashaba maintains he simply rid the city of corrupt and ineffective officials, and that their propensity to commit corruption does not constitute "institutional knowledge".)
Regardless of the political machinations at play, anyone who has had the misfortune of driving on Joburg’s pothole-riven roads, or had to trek along unkempt pavements, will know there’s a service delivery vacuum in the city. And it’s not just the roads and verges. Service delivery failure is rife across the board — a fact that suggests deep, systemic problems. It’s an issue that’s simply been compounded by an extraordinarily high rate of urbanisation, with thousands of people moving into the city each month, according to Joburg Water chair Sibusiso Buthelezi.
Road to nowhere
Some residents have taken to Twitter to express their outrage. Others have simply started fixing the issues themselves. The Panorama Residents Association (PRA), which operates in the western suburb of Weltevredenpark, is among the latter.
PRA deputy chair Michael Steyn tells the FM the association has been doing projects to improve the state of the suburb for at least five months.
"Everybody just got tired," he says. And so residents started taking responsibility for general maintenance and fixing potholes.
In October, the PRA bought a ton of asphalt with association funds and fixed about 50 potholes. Not that this was enough to resolve the problem completely — the PRA had simply run out of asphalt.
Only then did the Joburg Roads Agency (JRA) arrive to fill the remaining holes.
Makhubo says that, on a service delivery level at least, the JRA is his main headache — and his current priority, among the city’s dozen entities. But it’s by no means the only problematic one. There’s City Power, too.
A team of consultants has already started working at the agency to ensure energy sustainability, says City Power board chair Lindiwe Maseko. She hopes this will ease the impact of load-shedding on the city’s economy and its finances. As it stands, customers have turned to alternative energy sources, harming the agency’s revenue.
Among the issues under scrutiny are the causes of outages and response times, and rethinking systems to boost City Power’s financial and operational performance.
Add to this a woeful billing system, and Makhubo has his hands full.
But his biggest concern is the potholes.
Makhubo says his office is "descending" on the JRA, as he’s received reports indicating a governance problem at the entity. He’s clearly unhappy about the work that it delivers, not least the quality, which he calls "poor" and "suspect".
"We’ve expressed our unhappiness with the MMC," he says, referring to the IFP’s Nonhlanhla Makhuba, who remained in the portfolio after Mashaba left office. "But the mayor’s office now will be rolling [up its] sleeves and going to the ground with JRA. If it means I must shift my offices to [the] JRA, so be it. But it’s something we have to fix."
Governance of the JRA has been an issue for years. It’s a matter that was brought to the fore when respected former MD Sean Phillips resigned in August 2017. Both he and former company secretary Karen Mills had raised red flags around board interference, amid allegations of political interference.
Since then, the agency has seen much leadership instability, with a high turnover of staff — in particular in the MD position.
Those responsibilities now fall to the CEO, Selemo Republic Monakedi, who was appointed in September. But his own professional past has come under scrutiny.
A furore erupted after he was appointed over allegations of corruption and mismanagement during his stints as manager at two Limpopo municipalities, Business Day reported at the time. (However, JRA’s board says these claims are unsubstantiated.)
JRA chair Albert Mokoena tells the FM that while the board has been largely stable, the picture at the executive level is a different matter entirely. By December, the JRA executive management team was nearing its full complement, Mokoena explains. That same month, however, the CFO and head of corporate services, and three other officials, were placed on precautionary suspension following a finding by the auditor-general that they had allegedly played a role in securing contracts that led to unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
"The disciplinary process is under way in this regard," says Mokoena. "This action is in line with the leadership’s responsibility to ensure that there is good governance and accountable administration within the JRA.
"Despite the necessary disciplinary steps taken, there has been no disruption in the operations of the entity. To mitigate the situation, the JRA has appointed capable and qualified officials to act in the positions of the suspended officials."
While leadership is important, it’s not the only issue holding the JRA back. For example, the agency was not deemed to be an essential service during SA’s hard lockdown, which left it unable to function.
Then there are the own goals — including that the city’s own asphalt plant hasn’t been operational for months. The plant produces the material for fixing the roads.
Mokoena tells the FM the plant ceased to operate in August 2020 as a result of poor contract management: there was no plan in place when the plant’s maintenance and warranty contract lapsed. "Consequence management" is now on the cards for those officials who dropped the ball, he says, adding that Monakedi has made significant progress in getting the plant operational, and it’s expected to be back in the game come April 1.
"For the period when the plant is not in operation, the JRA has made alternative arrangements for the supply of asphalt so that work on the ground continues," he says. "Furthermore, SMMEs have been contracted to do the pothole repair work."
But this isn’t the only contractual mess that’s hamstrung service delivery in Joburg. In 2018, for example, rubbish piled up after refuse collector Pikitup came to a standstill when the contract for its fleet was bungled.
One would think that keeping important contracts current would be a no-brainer. In Joburg, that’s not proved to be the case.
Too many cooks
In part, Joburg’s service delivery woes are a result of the very way the city is structured.
Services are delivered on behalf of the city by the different entities, but each of these acts independently. And while each has a dedicated area of responsibility, these occasionally overlap — and that’s when delivery may fall through the cracks.
For example, as Joburg Water’s Buthelezi tells the FM, his agency replaces about 100km of pipes every year, which means digging trenches and digging into roads. But once it has completed a particular project, responsibility shifts to the JRA, which has to seal the roads Joburg Water dug up.
Though the JRA bills Joburg Water for this work, it is not keeping up with demand. "We have now taken a decision to seal the roads where we dig them up," says Buthelezi.
After all, it’s not the JRA that faces reputational damage if the job isn’t done, he explains, but Joburg Water — the agency that dug the trenches in the first place. It’s for this reason that the agency has taken the decision to "no longer wait for the JRA".
There are other examples of cross-entity responsibilities resulting in failures.
Michael Beaumont was the chief of staff during Mashaba’s term in the mayoral office. He tells the FM that one of the main aims of that administration was to conduct an institutional review that would have brought the entities more firmly into the ambit of the city.
That was not to be: though the council initially approved the review, it backtracked when issues were raised with the tender.
The matter went no further.
As it stands, the city is the shareholder in the various entities, but is not in control of operational implementation, as the entities are governed by boards that have to ensure compliance with the Municipal Finance Management Act, the Municipal Systems Act and the Companies Act.
It complicates things — not only for the municipality, which wants more direct control over its service delivery arms, but also for the boards themselves, as they work to comply with legislation that, on the one hand, empowers municipalities when it comes to decision-making, while on the other expects independent operations on the part of agency boards.
Former City Power board chair Lael Bethlehem raised this issue during that entity’s general meeting in 2019, according to Business Day, saying, it "gets very difficult for the board to take the responsibility the Companies Act requires you to take when so much of the decision-making and the day-to-day management is in fact outside of the workings of the board".
For the city’s frustrated residents, that’s a terrible excuse for nonperformance.
Former chief of staff Beaumont says residents evaluate service delivery — or its failures — through the city’s response when they raise a concern. But, he says, the system can be likened to the layers of an onion.
"The city systems have become so fragmented over time that it is impossible to produce a coherent, multidisciplinary response to a problem."
Take the billing problem, a longstanding issue that no administration has been able to fix. Beaumont says the trouble began when the different municipalities that today comprise Joburg were brought under the umbrella of the metro in December 2000.
When all their data was collated, the city ended up with a data set that made absolutely no sense.
Beaumont says it was essentially an IT problem that required a solution from software giant SAP, on whose platform the billing system operated. But every department and entity had its own relationship with SAP and its own systems. Some had changed so much that even SAP would no longer call them part of its systems.
Practically, it means no part of the system actually speaks to another.
Adding to the city’s billing woes is that Joburg’s finance department works independently from the various municipal entities. So when a complaint is received, it has to go to the municipal entities, which are not governed directly by the city, but by their respective boards.
This, Beaumont says, is entirely unregulated: there’s no formal relationship between the entities and the billing department. So as soon as there’s something to be fixed, the system gets stuck.
"They are two different companies essentially having to collaborate to fix the problem," he explains.
"It has created a service delivery screw-up second to none. And that is why the institutional review was such a huge project for that multiparty government, and its premature demise was such a tragedy, because bringing those entities into the city, and creating one coherent system under which they were all managed and co-ordinated was ... necessary to get things working."
That’s how you would fix the billing issue.
Makhubo claims the issue is not as bad as it was in 2010/2011 — though he acknowledges that there will always be some errors.
"We said then, if there’s an error, the speed with which you solve the error, the problem, the billing query, determines the customer experience as well," he says.
Raising revenue
Fixing the billing system is crucial, as it affects the city’s ability to collect the revenue that funds its mammoth budget.
That’s already taken a knock as a result of the pandemic, which made revenue collection tank during the first few months of the hard lockdown, and economies in SA’s metros contract by at least 8% in 2020.
But it was a tough economic space to begin with.
In the current financial year the total budget for the city amounts to about R68.5bn. But even though the city expects to collect R272m less than it first thought, the budget tabled in February still factors in a hike in spending.
Though hard hit during the lockdown, revenue collection seems to have largely recovered, says finance MMC Matongo — though some months prove to be an exception to the rule. He says collection rates were at 89.4% as of January, while the city was owed R33bn in total by its debtors.
In terms of the city’s cash position, Matongo says it had about R6bn in the bank in December, and that it costs about R4bn a month to run the city. And while the current budget makes provision for a R3.8bn loan, there’s been no need to use it so far in this financial year, though it is expected to be used in the coming months.
"We cannot say [the city’s finances] are in a bad situation," says Matongo. "[We] just need to improve the collection."
A downward slope
In light of the various and complex service delivery issues, it’s worth asking if Joburg is indeed a sinking city. The answer depends on whom you speak to.
Makhubo, perhaps unsurprisingly, is emphatic in rejecting the idea. In his view, Joburg is far from sinking — if anything, the city is "rising", and his administration is a part of that process.
Beaumont is more tempered. He believes it’s too strong to say Joburg is sinking, as that suggests a permanent, irreversible state. But he admits that it’s certainly regressed.
"And the reason it is regressive is it has an infrastructure backlog that runs into the hundreds of billions of rands, when you’re talking about its electricity, substations, its roads, water pipe network, you name it. And it has failed over many, many years to maintain that network."
He says Joburg’s infrastructure is best described in terms of buying a car: when it’s new, it works "terrifically". But if you don’t service it, it will take longer and cost more money to get it in working condition.
"What it will take now to actually fix that infrastructure is fast approaching the price of another car," he says.
No-one can stop degeneration, Beaumont says, but successful cities are being renewed faster than they are degenerating, and unsuccessful ones are degenerating faster than they are being renewed.
Service delivery failure suggests systemic problems, compounded by an extraordinarily high rate of urbanisation
— What it means:
In the case of Joburg, it’s been on "the wrong side of that equation for a very long time".
His point is that this is not a permanent state — provided the right decisions are made. But it’s "going to take a mammoth investment, and it’s going to take someone to get in there and make very unpopular, but necessary decisions".
Who the residents task with making those decisions for the next five years will be determined in the next local government elections, expected somewhere between August and November.
It will be a critical choice — not only for themselves, but for the country as a whole. As Mashaba said during his term in office: if Joburg works, SA works.
Musical chairs in the Joburg metro council
Joburg’s politics has been complex since the ANC lost outright power in the metro in the 2016 local government elections.
Almost five years on, there’s still no party that can claim a majority in the 270-seat council.
A total of 135 seats are occupied by ward councillors, while the other 135 are occupied on the basis of party proportional representation (PR).
After the 2016 poll, the ANC was the largest party in the council, followed by the DA and the EFF. But as a result of political manoeuvring, a DA-led coalition — with the voting support of the EFF — elected Herman Mashaba as mayor.
The coalition fell apart about three years later, after Mashaba resigned due to internal party politics.
This paved the way for the ANC’s Geoff Makhubo to be elected top politician in the city, with the support not only of some of the DA’s erstwhile coalition partners, but also with the help of some DA councillors.
Since that November 2019 council meeting, the city has been governed by an ANC-led coalition, which Makhubo calls the "government of local unity".
But because of the lack of an outright majority, getting council items passed has, for the most part, been a political numbers game.
One of the ways in which the ANC has worked to grow its presence in the metro council has been to win wards off the DA. Its coalition partners have also taken that road, with Al Jama-ah, for instance, taking a ward off the DA late last year.
Makhubo says this has given the ANC-led coalition, which includes Al Jama-ah, the IFP, Cope and the UDM, 136 seats in council.
It’s 50/50 as to whether we will have a coalition or a majority council in Joburg
— Ivor Sarakinsky
It’s the slimmest of majorities, but it’s meant the council was able to pass its adjustment budget in February without the support of either the DA or the EFF.
Makhubo believes the local ANC has done well for a year now to manage a complex group of people who "don’t know each other well".
But he says coalitions can be costly. For example, the coalition lost two seats in council when the relationship between the Patriotic Alliance and the ANC broke down.
In part, this is why the ANC doesn’t go into elections aiming for a coalition outcome. "We are going into an election with an aim to win," Makhubo says.
He’s hopeful the local government elections later this year will leave the ANC with an outright majority in the metro — though the DA and EFF have similar aims.
Leah Knott, the DA’s caucus leader in Joburg, says the aim is always to get above 50% of support in the poll. But coalitions have to be on the table to form a government if that mark isn’t achieved.
Joburg’s EFF leader Musa Novela believes the party can take the city with a majority, especially given the service delivery outcomes it drove during Mashaba’s administration.
But he’s not entirely opposed to coalitions, saying it means no single party can act "arrogantly".
Which of the parties could take the city in the next local government elections?
Wits professor Ivor Sarakinsky believes the odds are "50/50 as to whether we will have a coalition or a majority council in Joburg".
In the 2016 local government elections, when the DA grew dramatically and the ANC lost its majority, voter turnout in ANC strongholds was low, while turnout in DA strongholds was off the charts, says Sarakinsky.
That was at the height of growing public sentiment against then president Jacob Zuma.
But a lot has changed since then, he explains — including a general election in which the DA lost electoral momentum, and the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as ANC president.
The DA has also had to deal with turmoil in its own ranks since then, as well as losing votes to both the ANC and the Freedom Front Plus.
On the other hand, the FM understands the ANC in Joburg is highly factionalised — though Makhubo denies this outright.
Of course, Makhubo himself has an albatross around his neck: allegations that he did business with the city while in the position of finance MMC.
At the Zondo commission of inquiry, he was quizzed about his continued membership of Molelwane Consulting — a company contracted to work with Gupta-linked Regiments Capital, which managed the city’s sinking fund.
Joburg uses a sinking fund to pay back inherited debts and investments made to the city.
While Regiments’ contract should have expired in 2011, before Makhubo became a councillor and finance MMC, it instead continued into 2015 — while he occupied the portfolio that had oversight of the sinking fund.
He believes he was not conflicted in the matter and tells the FM he is waiting for deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo’s report, which is expected to be completed before the elections take place.
With all of these elements in play, it’s set to be an interesting election and voter turnout will play an important role, as it affects the PR seat allocation in particular.
In a city in which the politics is so divided, a single seat could mean the difference between a majority or a coalition government.
Sarakinsky says it’s unlikely the DA will approximate the "stratospheric" turnout it had in 2016, given its 2019 performance. This could give the ANC a foot in the door.
But Joburg residents’ experiences over the past five years will be top of mind when they make their marks.
They’ll want a council that’s more concerned about their needs than trying to keeping coalition partners happy.
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