Johannesburg residents experience the city very differently to the version presented during the latest State of the City Address.

Across many communities, residents are dealing with water outages, power failures, broken roads, billing disputes, decaying infrastructure and declining public trust. Yet the speech projected a city on the rise.

OUTA says this growing disconnect between political messaging and lived reality damages public confidence even further.

The city’s financial crisis did not emerge overnight. It is the result of years of poor governance, weak oversight and political failure. The concern now is whether those responsible for the decline are capable of reversing it.

OUTA also questions why serious intervention from provincial government only appears to be escalating months before local elections.

Read OUTA’s full analysis of the speech and the governance concerns facing Johannesburg here.