Johannesburg’s difficulties are commonly described through their most visible manifestations: unreliable water and electricity supply, deteriorating infrastructure, weak financial controls, maintenance backlogs, billing failures and repeated changes in political and administrative leadership.

The Crisis of Johannesburg: An agenda for institutional reform examines how these problems are connected. Commissioned by the Centre for Development and Enterprise as part of its Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s Growth Engine series, the report argues that Johannesburg’s crisis is not adequately explained as a problem of leadership or coordination alone. Its central concern is the institutional position of the municipal administration itself.

The report traces the development of Johannesburg’s governing institutions from the creation of the metropolitan municipality in December 2000. The new municipality brought together an area of roughly 1,644 square kilometres, compared with approximately 269 square kilometres covered by the former Johannesburg City Council around 1990. It incorporated areas including Soweto, Sandton, Randburg, Roodepoort, Alexandra, Lenasia, Diepsloot, Midrand and Orange Farm within a single metropolitan authority.

This institutional consolidation was accompanied by the iGoli 2002 reforms, under which major service functions were placed in municipally owned entities such as City Power, Johannesburg Water, Pikitup and the Johannesburg Roads Agency. These organisations were given boards, executives and service-delivery agreements with the City, creating a degree of separation between political decision-making and operational administration.

The report argues that this separation was never securely established in law. Under the Municipal Systems Act, the municipal council retains extensive authority over the appointment of the municipal manager and senior managers and over the allocation of municipal responsibilities. As a result, the boundary between elected political authority and professional administration has remained dependent in practice on political arrangements rather than on a durable institutional settlement.

The consequences became more apparent as Johannesburg entered the period of coalition government after the 2016 local elections. The report documents increasing turnover among mayors, members of the Mayoral Committee, senior municipal executives and the boards of municipal entities. It links this instability to a broader decline in administrative continuity and technical capacity.

Financial and operational trends are examined alongside this institutional history. Johannesburg’s employee costs increased from about R5.1 billion in 2009 to R15.8 billion in 2023, while expenditure on contracted services rose from approximately R2 billion to between R6 billion and R7 billion over the same period. In April 2026, the Minister of Finance raised concerns about revenue collection, employee and bulk-electricity expenditure, and the financial implications of a municipal wage agreement.

The report also treats Johannesburg’s persistent billing failures as an institutional problem rather than simply an information-technology problem. The City historically operated a consolidated municipal account covering services including rates, electricity, water and refuse. In 2009 it began a R580 million project to consolidate fragmented billing systems onto a single SAP platform intended to serve approximately 1.3 million account holders. By 2011, 60,000 billing queries had been recorded, of which 35,535 had received responses. The report argues that technical systems cannot resolve unclear lines of responsibility between the City’s central administration and its utilities.

An agenda for institutional reform

The report proposes reforms at both national and municipal level. Nationally, it recommends the establishment of a statutory Municipal Managers’ Professional Council of South Africa, responsible for registering, certifying and disciplining municipal administrative executives and for vetting candidates for senior municipal positions, while retaining the formal appointment role of elected councils.

For Johannesburg, the report proposes a clearer institutional separation between the council, the political executive and the municipal administration. Its recommendations include a transparent, merit-based process for appointing the city manager; stronger delegated authority for the city manager over staffing and administrative decisions; restrictions on political office-bearers issuing operational instructions to officials; and renewed five-year terms for appropriately qualified boards of municipal entities.

It also recommends rebuilding a Contracts Management Unit in the office of the city manager to monitor municipal entities and service-delivery agreements, supported by technical expertise and on-site inspection capacity. On billing, the report calls for explicit rules governing revenue ownership, customer credit decisions, disconnections, the allocation of payments between services and the use of utility revenues by the central municipal treasury.

The report’s central proposition is that improvements in Johannesburg’s finances, infrastructure and service delivery will remain difficult to sustain without a clearer institutional boundary between political authority and professional municipal administration.

Publication: September 2026
Author: Ivor Chipkin
Commissioned by: Centre for Development and Enterprise
Series: Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s Growth Engine