One week before South Africa's local elections, Johannesburg's Alexandra township is buried under piles of rotting rubbish, and the Jukskei River runs brown with foul-smelling water choked by litter and rubble.
Semadi Manganye, chief executive of the environmental NGO Alexandra Water Warriors, which organises river clean-ups and plants trees on its banks, said the city faces multiple overlapping crises. "We've got way too many challenges," he said. "If it's not electricity, it's water. If it's not water, it's waste."
Population growth strains services
Manganye acknowledged the difficulty of delivering 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 go to the polls amid deep discontent over water cuts, power outages and potholes affecting the country's 257 municipalities. 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."
Financial distress and infrastructure backlog
In the last financial year (2024-25), only 39 local governments, 15% of the total, received a "clean" audit from the auditor general. Two-thirds are "financially distressed", according to a parliamentary budget office report.
The problems are most acute in Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city and commercial capital, which has had 10 changes of mayor in the past decade amid unstable coalitions. Authorities have admitted to a 220bn rand (£9.9bn) infrastructure spending backlog, and it is estimated that a quarter of the water bought by 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 the 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.
Affluent suburbs also affected
Even some affluent northern suburbs are going without piped water for weeks at a time. After a month-long outage about six months ago, residents of parts of Melville and Westdene have been unable to predict when they will get water since September.
Kate Spiller, a semi-retired management consultant, described the situation as "desperate, because literally there's been almost no water at all". She and her husband drive 10 minutes almost daily to a mosque with a borehole to fill about a dozen five-litre bottles for 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.
Morero said in an interview after the Rabie Ridge meeting: "Overall, Johannesburg is providing the necessary services to our communities. 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, saying syndicates were "organised and affecting our infrastructure".
Corruption and political contest
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."
Rashid Seedat, a former city official and executive director of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, said: "People in charge of the supply chain system can easily get backhanders. 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 (DA), South Africa's second-largest party, has campaigned energetically in Johannesburg under 75-year-old former Cape Town mayor Helen Zille, aiming 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, including for tweets in 2017 that said colonialism was not completely negative. Viral stunts, such as Zille snorkelling in an enormous flooded pothole, have helped put the DA ahead of the ANC in the polls.
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, analysts say this may not be enough for Zille to form a coalition.
Ziyanda Stuurman of the consultancy Africa Practice said: "In order to understand Joburg, you actually have to zoom out a bit and look at all of Gauteng [province]. 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 similar coalition 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."
