Piles of rubbish, power cuts and potholes: anger grows over Johannesburg’s run-down infrastructure

One week before the local elections in South Africa, the pavements and roads of the Johannesburg township Alexandra were filled with piles of rubbish, rotting in the heat. At the Jukskei River, its banks choked with rubble and litter, foul-smelling brown water flowed out of a culvert.

“We’ve got way too many challenges,” said Semadi Manganye, the chief executive of Alexandra Water Warriors, an environmental NGO that organises clean-ups of the river and plants trees on its banks. “If it’s not electricity, it’s water. If it’s not water, it’s waste.”

Manganye acknowledged the challenges of providing public services in a city whose population grew by 10% to 4.8 million between the 2011 and 2022 censuses. “I have an understanding of why they’re failing,” he said. “But we’ve got to mitigate against this – we knew that it was going to happen.”

On 4 November, up to 29 million South African voters will go to the polls for local elections amid deep discontent with the water cuts, power outages and potholes that plague the country’s 257 municipalities. Their problems are so deep that even the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has admitted: “Too many of our municipalities are failing to meet the needs and expectations of the people they are meant to serve.”

In the last financial year (2024-25), only 39 local governments, 15% of the total, received a “clean” audit from the country’s auditor general. Two-thirds are “financially distressed”, according to a parliamentary budget office report.

Nowhere are the problems more pressing than in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and commercial capital. The city has been ruled by a series of unstable coalitions, with 10 changes of mayor in the past decade. Authorities have admitted to a 220bn rand (£9.9bn) infrastructure spending backlog. It is estimated that a quarter of the water bought by the municipal water body Johannesburg Water is lost to leaks.

At a public meeting in Rabie Ridge, a township in the city’s north-east, about 400 people berated the incumbent mayor, Dada Morero, and executives from Johannesburg’s electricity utility, City Power.

One person said she had had no power for six months. Another said her mother had been forced to turn to loan sharks after receiving energy bills as high as 6,000 rand a month when her monthly pension was 2,000 rand.

“If there is any organisation that is dysfunctional it is this organisation … it is failing,” one man said, drawing huge cheers from the audience.

Even some affluent northern suburbs are going without piped water for weeks at a time. After a month-long outage about six months ago, people in parts of Melville and Westdene have been unable to predict when they will get water since September.

“The word I’d use is desperate, because literally there’s been almost no water at all,” said Kate Spiller, a semi-retired management consultant. “During the day, there’s dribs and drabs. And then sometimes in the middle of night, my husband’s been able to fill a couple of five-litre bottles and then it’s gone dry again.”

Spiller and her husband drive 10 minutes almost daily to a mosque that has a borehole to fill up about a dozen five-litre bottles, which they use to take bucket showers. “It’s incapacitating … you’re always planning, you’re always thinking: ‘We need to get water, we’d better make a plan,’” she said.

“Overall, Johannesburg is providing the necessary services to our communities,” Morero said in an interview after the Rabie Ridge meeting. “Isolated areas where they don’t have [services], we are focusing on right now.”

He acknowledged parts of the inner city were without power, due to a “collapsed” substation, but blamed “vandalism” and criminals. “From time to time, with the JPMD [Johannesburg Metropolitan police department] we try to push back, but there are also syndicates who are also organised and affecting our infrastructure,” he said.

However, experts have said many city politicians and officials are themselves corrupt. An October report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said: “Governance failure in the CoJ [city of Johannesburg] has given birth to a criminal ecosystem.”

“People in charge of the supply chain system can easily get backhanders,” said Rashid Seedat, a former city official and the executive director of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, a research organisation.

“Of course, corruption is the metro police officer taking a bribe of 200 rand [and] a 200m rand tender. It’s across the board and endemic in the entire system and acceptable.”

The Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s second-largest political party, has mounted an energetic campaign in Johannesburg, under the 75-year-old former Cape Town mayor Helen Zille, to try to unseat the African National Congress (ANC) and its coalition partners, the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the populist Patriotic Alliance.

Zille, who is white, has previously caused controversy, particularly among black voters, including for tweets in 2017 that said colonialism was not completely negative. However, viral stunts that have drawn attention to Johannesburg’s infrastructure issues, such as Zille snorkelling in an enormous flooded pothole, have helped to put the DA ahead of the ANC in the polls (voters choose parties and councillors, who in turn elect the mayor).

The DA has polled between 29% and 36% in October, compared with 22% to 27% for the ANC, which is fielding three possible mayoral candidates amid factional infighting. However, this may not be enough for Zille to form a coalition, analysts say.

“In order to understand Joburg, you actually have to zoom out a bit and look at all of Gauteng [province],” said Ziyanda Stuurman of Africa Practice, a consultancy. “Over the last decade, and especially since 2021, there’s been this very clear working relationship between the ANC, EFF and ActionSA across the three municipalities [Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni].

“Once in-principle coalition arrangements are agreed to, you’ve seen the EFF back ANC and ActionSA mayors across all three cities and there’s been a negotiation keeping in mind all three.”

Stuurman said a coalition similar to recent ones could lead to five more years of decline in Johannesburg. “It’s been much more horse-trading than it actually has been about the city’s best interests.”