JoburgCAN attended last week’s Johannesburg City Council meeting, and found the council backlogged and dysfunctional despite tabling strong turnaround strategies for failing entities. 

Communities from around the City of Johannesburg gathered on Saturday 27 July in the shadow of the municipal chamber to demand service delivery and accountability, in the form of the resignation of Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda and his executive. 

Despite the growing scrutiny of Gwamanda’s handling of crises in the city – such as the outcry over a poorly implemented and unaffordable prepaid electricity service charge – the mayor continued to criticise residents and call civil society out, saying he and his administration were doing an excellent job after inheriting a broken city. Consider that an article published by Bloomberg (6/08/2024) estimates that the city needs R221 billion rand ($12 billion) “to catch up on maintenance and overdue upgrades across its collapsing road, power and water networks”.

On the 30th and 31st of July, the City Council held a two-day meeting, but the council was overwhelmed with too much work and an inability to prioritise, leaving issues that matter most to residents unattended. Anyone who joined that Saturday protest demanding some clear leadership will have to look elsewhere.

In support of his claims of good practice and strong policy, Gwamanda touted the tabling at the council meeting of a City Power turnaround strategy, a Joburg Water turnaround strategy and, in response to a poster at the protest which read “Kliptown development, now or never”, the Kliptown urban development framework (UDF). These three items were loaded onto a heavy 104-item agenda to be discussed over two days.

The agenda also included some really important administrative and operational points, such as human resources appointments, the quarterly financial reports, and performance assessment reports for departments and entities. However, before the meeting even started most of the Section 79 financial reports were removed and the agenda slashed, but even so by 4pm on day two, only a handful of the HR issues had been addressed. Poor timekeeping, political point scoring and constant caucus breaks took precedence.

The Kliptown UDF will have to wait for a special extraordinary meeting at the end of August, while the debates and responses to the strategies were pushed into the last hour of the meeting alongside remuneration package increases and changes to the committee structures.

The HR appointments were to fill positions of the Integrity Commissioner, the Secretary to Council and executive directors for four departments, namely community development, environment and infrastructure, group corporate and shared services, and communications and technology management.

These posts all carry high levels of responsibility and come with big pay packets. However, one preferred candidate is currently under disciplinary review, and others have a history of failures in the positions they already hold in the city and should have been performance managed out of contention. Because of the seniority of these appointments, a review board interrogates the hiring process, but somehow candidates described as “marginally” meeting the requirements were still promoted. As is often the case with analysis of council operations, it devolved into personal attacks and left little to be admired in terms of true oversight.

The turnaround strategies deserved their moment in the spotlight. In the words of several councillors, these are some of the most honest and refreshing accounts of the issues or failings of the City’s key service entities. 

“City Power faces severe difficulties due to increasing generation costs, frequent load shedding, poor revenue collection and operational inefficiencies particularly high non-technical losses in the distribution network,” reads the report on the entity’s turnaround strategy, which is an echo of what civil society has been saying for years. “These challenges threaten the reliability of power supply, affecting local industries, business, and residents. The company’s tariff structures pose additional risk to Johannesburg’s attractiveness as an investment destination and its competitiveness in service charges.”

The report also admits that “there has been a long-term decline in investment in infrastructure renewal and expansion, exacerbated by issues like loadshedding and vulnerability to theft and vandalism”, while “cash collection rates have plummeted”.

This plan is comprehensive and at its core is improving customer trust and satisfaction to improve collection. This will happen by ensuring sound financials, asset maintenance and creating new generation assets.

This is a welcome breath of fresh air through the smoke and mirrors of other policy plans. However, this plan is not in the budget.

Just the infrastructure backlog will cost billions. The budget ask for securing of substations and switching stations budget is R828.1 million. Certain elements like the further outsourcing of prepaid metering to “enhance efficiencies” need to be closely followed to ensure contractor costs are kept low and additional service charges are not further passed down to customers. City Power has undertaken to “annually review and adjust electricity tariffs to ensure they reflect the cost of supply and meet regulatory and operational needs” and JoburgCAN awaits that report in more detail. The incorporation of Sandton and Soweto into City Power’s control (the City and Eskom have an agreement to do a feasibility study on this) may further weaken the City’s debtors book and should only be attempted after the current supply area grid is at peak optimisation.

The Joburg Water turnaround strategy holds the same promise, if funded and implemented as planned. The OUTA WaterCAN initiative will engage directly on this vital item in more depth. 

Other inefficiencies in the management of City assets were addressed in the transfer of non-performing rental stock from entity JOSHCO back to the city. This covers both social housing and retirement villages which are in dire need of maintenance and investment, and to improve allocation. These properties will now fall directly under the City’s Department of Human Settlements.

JoburgCAN agrees that much of what was covered was good work. However, as residents calling for accountability said on the doorstep of council on Saturday, this is just not enough, and we deserve better. We need a leadership that recognises we are at panic stations, continually in crisis. The failing functions of the City cannot be passed down again to another administration that continues to blame those that came before without the urgency and ringfenced budgets to fix services.

The council’s haphazard approach is illustrated by events in the last two weeks: passing emergency loans to cover last year’s unfunded projects, tabling unfunded strategies, and passing increases for managers who have not met their key performance indicators.

There must be consequences for the state of the economic hub of the country, but we are not seeing them. 

The Speaker of Council, Margaret Arnolds, when addressing the council on the lack of progress on the agenda and the need for an additional meeting, said “councillors, you have done this to yourselves, you only have yourselves to blame”.

JoburgCAN believes that Joburg residents should work together and lay the blame where it belongs, with the City council. The administration of the City and service delivery will not improve until the council and its executive face the reality of their inaction.

*JoburgCAN is an initiative of OUTA, for and by the residents of the City of Joburg.