Paul Maritz: The five urgent reforms that can save Johannesburg
Key topics:
Five urgent reforms proposed to revive Johannesburg
Focus on water, finances, safety, and transparency
Helen Zille urged to confront root causes of decay
This article was first published by PoliticsWeb.
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By Paul Maritz
I grew up in Johannesburg. Without getting soppy, those noisy streets and cracked sidewalks raised me. Like many who grew up there, I no longer live there, but it will always be my home. My home isn’t what it used to be. The streets are scarier and more blistered, the taps are drier, and the public services are creaking under the weight of years of neglect. Watching a city that is supposed to be the New York of Africa crumble before your eyes is depressing, but alas, despair is not a strategy, and the future belongs to the optimists. What the city needs is radical change, and if Helen Zille is to become mayor, she simply must confront not just the symptoms of decay but its root causes.
This sounds simple enough, but what does it mean? Here is a memorandum of five urgent but actionable steps that she can and must take within a single five-year term to set Johannesburg on the path to recovery, or at least to steer it away from impending doom. While there might be some quick fixes, Johannesburg will not be fixed in a couple of months - one dedicated mayoral term, however, might well turn the ship.
1. A Water Restoration & Loss Reduction Blitz
The first crisis she must address is water. Johannesburg is bleeding nearly half of its potable supply through leaks, burst mains, and theft before it even reaches households. Residents in several suburbs have endured weeks without running water, while Johannesburg Water itself struggles with a R26 billion renewal backlog and frequent vandalism of its systems. A city without water dies a quick and horrible death. One of the biggest cities on earth without a natural water supply, even more so.
To address this, a dedicated task force that brings together municipal engineers, Johannesburg Water, private sector partners, and civil society is needed, sort of in the way that Minister Schreiber attacked the visa backlog.
For starters, a citywide audit must be launched, literally block by block, to pinpoint where water is being lost and where illegal connections are draining the grid. New leak-detection technology, already widely available and used in the private sector, should be rolled out first in the worst-affected zones to secure quick wins. And because theft and vandalism are now systemic, coordination with law enforcement must be strengthened, including the creation of infrastructure protection units tasked specifically with safeguarding the water network.
A recurring theme throughout these five points will be that there are many who profit from a decrepit Johannesburg, and so obstructive politicians and targeted vandalism will be part of every step that is taken. Upgraded CCTV systems and the above-mentioned teams are unfortunately a requirement if any of this is to work.
Success should not be left vague - any modern IT-development team starts by defining “done”, meaning, when has this task been completed. For this particular point, which has to be at the top of all lists, I propose that within two years, the city should aim to reduce non-revenue water from roughly 45 percent to 30 percent at most. Within six to twelve months, the new mayor should be able to point to neighbourhoods where taps have run dry for years and where water is now flowing again. In a city so parched for competence, even modest restoration will send a powerful message and get the confidence of its residents.
2. Stabilising Finances and Ring-Fencing Utilities
Water outages, failing electricity, and broken sanitation systems are not only technical failures, they are also financial ones. As essentially all residents know, Johannesburg’s books have been plundered, with billions diverted away from core utilities into other struggling entities. Without fiscal discipline, no service can be sustainably delivered. I would also argue Maslow on this point - there is a hierarchy of needs in a city, and water is number one.
Zille, should she be elected, must insist on ring-fencing the budgets of water, electricity, and sanitation immediately. This means that revenues raised in these sectors should first fund their own operations. To achieve this, she should commission an independent forensic audit of the city’s last decade of financial flows, publishing the findings in full to the public. Billing systems, notorious for errors and under-collection, must be modernised, with smart metering and digital transparency. At the same time, the city must be realistic: many residents cannot pay in full. In such cases, targeted subsidies or credit arrangements can ensure quality of life while protecting the overall revenue base and preventing abuse.
The target should be a clean, credible balance sheet within two years, one where utility revenues are no longer cannibalised and where capital budgets for infrastructure are restored to their rightful purpose. If that is achieved, Johannesburg can once again borrow intelligently and invest with confidence, instead of lurching from crisis to crisis.
3. Upgrading the City’s Margins: Informal Settlements
Johannesburg’s most vulnerable residents are concentrated in informal settlements that lack even the most basic services. The COVID pandemic exposed how deadly these gaps can be, with poor sanitation and limited access to clean water turning neighbourhoods into public health hazards. These areas have been written off for too long, yet the majority of the city’s growth is happening precisely here.
The mayor should launch a “Basic Services Accord” with these communities. Rather than waiting for full formalisation, the city can begin with incremental improvements: communal water points, shared sanitation pods, drainage, lighting, and waste removal. Mapping every settlement, establishing clear baselines, and publishing service targets for all to see will demonstrate seriousness. Residents themselves must be enlisted as partners, through micro-contract training and measurable outcomes that allow them to maintain and extend infrastructure. Thus far, I have resisted the urge to venture into the ideological, but it is simply a fact that Marxism dictates destruction before construction, thereby discouraging the idea of a public that takes personal responsibility for its public spaces and public assets. While a good mayor can drive change, every one of the roughly seven million inhabitants has to shoulder his and her part of the responsibility, however small that responsibility might be.
The benchmarks should similarly be clear: within the first year, no settlement should be left without access to at least 50 litres of clean water per person per day, basic toilets, and drainage should be non-negotiable. Over five years, the backlog of households with no service at all should be cut by at least two-thirds. In this way, Zille can make Johannesburg’s margins visible and liveable, instead of leaving them in the shadows.
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4. Restoring Safety and Protecting Infrastructure
Johannesburg is also a city where crime and decay feed each other. I’ve alluded to this, but the fact is that crime pays, nowhere more so than in the city of gold. Dark streets, potholes, and abandoned infrastructure create the very conditions where vandalism, theft, and violence thrive. No infrastructure project will last if it is left unprotected in such an environment, and no talented young person will stay and wait for their turn to be a victim.
A priority must therefore be to restore public safety in tandem with service delivery. To achieve this there will have to be pilot “Safe Infrastructure Zones” in the inner city and along major corridors into the heart of the CBD. Here, street lighting should be replaced with efficient LED systems backed by solar power if possible (these solutions are becoming cheaper by the day); CCTV and community policing forums should be integrated; and rapid-response squads should be deployed to repair vandalised or stolen infrastructure within hours.
Initially, criminal elements will test the limits of the new mayor’s resolve, but seeing as crime is very rarely the brave man’s game, a bit of perseverance from the municipality will soon see vandals and destroyers seek other means in which to ply their trade. Roads must be rehabilitated strategically, both to improve daily life and to ensure service vehicles can actually reach communities in need. To me, this means that an initial audit determines where the most damage is and which routes are the most crucial. Finding the intersection of these two metrics should point the mayor and her team to their starting point.
If such pilots can reduce vandalism by half within the first year and raise streetlight uptime to above 90 percent, the mayor will not only protect investments but also signal that Johannesburg is reclaiming control of its streets, albeit a soft signal. Safety, in this sense, is not an afterthought, but it is the foundation of urban recovery.
5. A Transparent Dashboard and Citizen Accountability Pact
Finally, residents have seen mayor after mayor promise reforms, only to watch projects stall, funds vanish, and corruption thrive. Without transparency, even the best plans will be dismissed as empty talk or be stalled by bureaucracy and obstructive politicians. So why not tell the world why these projects are stalling? If we live in an era of information, let’s give the people information.
The best way to achieve this transparency would be through a web- and app-based platform that keeps citizens up to date. In cities like Frankfurt am Main in Germany or Hong Kong, citizens can check the current traffic, weather, air quality, and even free parking spaces. Why not go even further? If Johannesburg can create a public project dashboard accessible by web and mobile that lists every major service initiative: its budget, contractor, timeline, and progress, the public can understand why projects are stalling, and who is stalling them.
I would go even further and list the company to which a tender was given, and list that company’s board of directors. In various European countries, this has become normal; the chairperson of the board of a public company has their name published in the footer of every bill and every invoice. Tell the people who won the tender, tell the people how much the tender is worth, and what the next deliverable is.
Quarterly progress reviews, broadcast widely, should compel city leaders and those who wish to do business with the city to answer directly to residents. Independent oversight panels, including experts and civil society voices, should review contracts and audits. And each department head should be tied to measurable, public key performance indicators. Finally, no more hiding. A live broadcast public hearing at least once a year, where heads of departments answer the questions of the public.
The goal is to make Johannesburg the most transparent municipality in South Africa within a single term. By publishing scorecards for every ward and every service, the mayor can ensure that success is not measured by speeches but by delivery. Transparency, once institutionalized, becomes the citizens’ best defence against failure. The time of scheming and conspiring is over; where there is light, there can be no darkness. An additional benefit is that this kind of approach to politics will scare away those who were only interested in it for the connections and the opportunities for personal enrichment.
Conclusion
It would be naïve to think that any of these reforms will proceed without resistance. Johannesburg is not only a city in decay; it is a city where decay has become very profitable. Corruption, patronage, and sabotage are not accidents — they are entrenched interests. This means that every step outlined here will be contested, delayed, or undermined.
That being said, if anyone can do it, I think that it has to be Helen Zille. While I don’t know her personally, her record seems to indicate a real hope in the dream of what South Africa should be. She probably has enough money to retire on Mouille Point and watch the whales, but the fact that she keeps going means that it isn’t about the salary or the perks. She also has enough of a legacy that risking it on this job doesn’t make sense as an ego move.
I think that she understands what will happen to the country if its economic hub collapses, and how catastrophic that will be for the rest of the continent. If she is to take this office, she must see these obstacles not as deterrents but as part of the job itself. And if she can overcome them, she will not only save Johannesburg from collapse but prove that South Africa’s cities can still be governed with integrity and resolve.
This city was founded by people willing to dig deeper than anyone had ever dug before, and for Helen Zille, this will be true as well. But if she digs deep, she will surely find that those hills with their perfect weather and friendly inhabitants can still be the city of gold, the city that allows golden rays to be carried out of its depths.
This article was first published by PoliticsWeb and is republished with permission.