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The recovery of Medellín in Colombia depended on a city government that could combine security, investment and capable utilities.
The city of Johannesburg – South Africa’s largest – is increasingly unable to perform even its most basic functions, such as providing clean water and electricity and maintaining its roads and the safety of its citizens.
It has the symptoms of a broken city: deteriorating financial controls, a swelling wage bill, unstable coalitions and rapid mayoral turnover. Describing these problems, however, does not amount to a diagnosis. And no project of renewal can begin without a diagnosis. My research over the last three decades has focused on the challenges of government in post-apartheid South Africa.
I also spent years working on local government, both as an activist opposed to apartheid and as part of the team that developed the White Paper on local government in 1998. In a recently published paper, The Crisis of Johannesburg: An Agenda for Institutional Reform, commissioned by an independent think tank, the Centre for Development and Enterprise, I explored the governance of the city, why it has deteriorated so seriously over the last ten years and what might be done about it.
I argue that the conventional diagnosis – that Johannesburg’s crisis is simply one of poor governance and weak leadership – is insufficient. The deeper problem is institutional and legal. I argue that the problem with the city, like other municipalities in the country, is that the administration only exists in name. All power lies with the council.
The city manager has no inherent authority to hire staff or to make operational decisions. In devising solutions I draw on the experience of Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city. For a long time it was officially the deadliest place in the world. Its recovery depended on a city government that could combine security, investment and capable utilities.
Johannesburg’s recovery will depend on applying a similar approach. Its utilities – City Power, Johannesburg Water and the waste management service provider Pikitup – must get real operational autonomy. Johannesburg now has to decide whether its utilities will be used for rebuilding the city, and whether it is prepared to confront the political and criminal networks that will resist this.
The emergence of a mega-city Over the past 30 years Johannesburg has developed into a large metropolitan entity absorbing other towns and municipalities. The idea was to create a new city as a metropolitan authority that could pool resources across historically unequal areas. The city was also restructured through the iGoli 2002 plan. Major service functions were reorganised into corporatised entities.
The idea was that these functions were large technical businesses and needed to be run as such. They required dedicated management, clear responsibilities and accountabilities, technically competent employees and financial discipline. These reforms were controversial from the beginning. The South African Municipal Workers Union and the not-for-profit campaign group the Anti-Privatisation Forum opposed them as concessions to neoliberalism.
Johannesburg never settled how the utilities should relate to the city administration in terms of governance and decision making over finances. The result has been a hybrid arrangement. The utilities are expected to operate like businesses. But many of the key functions on which a business depends are centralised and politically contested.
Billing, treasury, cash allocation, staff appointments, procurement and capital expenditure were never insulated from wider municipal instability. The utilities were autonomous enough to fragment responsibility, but not autonomous enough to protect their own operations. The problem is political. The Municipal Systems Act, passed in 2000, created the position of municipal manager, appointed by the council.
But the act did not provide a clean separation between political direction and administrative authority. Councils remain deeply involved in appointments and senior administrative arrangements. Executive mayors, mayoral committees, boards and entity executives all have roles, but accountability is dispersed. In the coalition period, which began in 2016 when the African National Congress lost its majority in the city council, the administrative space has weakened further.
Over the past decade the city has too often been divided between coalition partners. Each has treated departments or entities as personal areas of influence. This has affected appointments, boards, procurement and operational decisions. The result is the conversion of municipal institutions into political assets.
Utilities that should be technical service institutions have become sites of patronage, rent extraction and factional control. This is where Medellín offers a useful point of reference. What fixing problems took in Medellín In the 1980s and 1990s the city became known as the most violent in the world. By 2013, however, it had come to be recognised as the most innovative.
Medellín’s recovery required the restoration of public authority in areas where powerful criminal and armed cartels had displaced the state. The state had to become visible and useful where it had been absent or predatory. The municipal utility, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, was central to this process. It supplied electricity, water, sanitation and telecommunications.
It generated revenue, maintained infrastructure and helped finance the city’s broader investment programme. It showed that a public utility can be commercially disciplined and socially useful at the same time. It can provide services effectively, generate resources for the city, and support investment in poorer areas. This is the main lesson for Johannesburg.
Utilities are a problem if they are poorly governed and politicised, and if they don’t have protected cash flows, competent management or clear authority. Medellín’s experience shows that utilities can be part of the renewal of a city if they have: Vested interests will resist change This will not be a purely administrative exercise. Renewal in Johannesburg will confront interests that benefit from the current disorder. Some of these interests are inside formal politics.
Some sit on boards, or in entities, departments and supply chains. Some operate through contractors, local brokers or criminal networks. A reform programme that threatens these arrangements should expect resistance. That resistance may take the form of litigation, obstruction, leaks, disinformation, labour disruption, sabotage of infrastructure, intimidation of officials, and violence around worksites and depots.
Johannesburg’s recovery will require both professionalisation and enforcement. It will need a professional and relatively autonomous administration, but also a policing strategy capable of protecting infrastructure, officials, contractors and communities from organised disruption. This does not mean militarising municipal government. It means recognising that service delivery depends on public authority.
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