South Africa

South Africa’s most important city crumbling in front of everyone’s eyes

Daily Investor • 29 January 2026

Johannesburg is facing severe service delivery problems, including an unstable power and water supply, crumbling road infrastructure, and widespread flooding.

This is the view of Professor Alex van den Heever from the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

He holds the Chair of Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies and is a prominent expert in South African public policy.

His research and professional work focus on health economics, social security policy, public finance, and governance and accountability.

In an interview with SABC News, he said the collapse of service delivery and infrastructure in Johannesburg continues unabated.

He added that nothing has changed under the current mayor, Dada Morero, the Presidential working group, or the so-called bomb squad.

“There has been no systemic change in the performance of Johannesburg due to these interventions,” he said.

“City Power is essentially insolvent. Water services are continuously disrupted. There are big potholes in the roads. There are major floods in many areas.”

Van den Heever said his own meter at his house has not been repaired in over a year despite numerous complaints.

“That is the kind of operation that is being run. You cannot possibly manage your revenue with such incompetence,” he said.

He explained that many of the companies that provide services to the City of Johannesburg are run very poorly.

“These companies are run by ANC deployees and political appointees. This was illustrated by a CEO of an agency who had just been arrested,” he said.

He described it as appalling, adding that the person was very young and likely not competent to run the company.

Van den Heever dismissed the notion that the motion of no confidence against Morero is about improving service delivery.

Instead, he argued, it was linked to people serving private interests within the City of Johannesburg government.

Johannesburg’s continued water problems

Johannesburg’s deteriorating water infrastructure, managed by Joburg Water, is exacerbating the impact of Rand Water’s maintenance on the city’s water supply.

This is because Joburg Water has failed to perform the required maintenance on municipal infrastructure.

In turn, it is resulting in leaks at its reservoirs and an inability to efficiently deliver water from the bulk supplier to the end user.

The pending collapse of the city’s water infrastructure is symbolic of its wider decline, with the country’s economic hub increasingly showing signs of decay.

This is feedback from WaterCAN’s Dr Ferrial Adam, who explained that the majority of the blame should lie at the feet of Joburg Water and not Rand Water.

Adam’s comments come amid warnings from Morero that residents may experience up to 7 days without water due to Rand Water maintenance.

This is the final phase of Rand Water maintenance, and the third of three planned phases for the December 2025 to January 2026 period. The 54-hour maintenance session will take place at the Eikenhof pump station.

Adam explained that you have to separate Rand Water from Joburg Water. Rand Water is the bulk supplier, while Joburg Water manages the municipality’s infrastructure.

“In terms of their maintenance, Rand Water has been doing the required amount in 2024 and 2025. That has been important,” Adam told Newzroom Afrika.

“When looking at the state of water supply in Joburg, that is Joburg Water, where we are lacking adequate maintenance, and it is absolutely not doing enough.”

Adam explained that typically, residents should not feel the effect of Rand Water’s maintenance on their water supply.

Joburg Water’s reservoirs and pumping stations should have adequate storage and alternatives to ensure supply is not disrupted when Rand Water conducts maintenance upstream.

“What is happening in Joburg specifically is that local municipal infrastructure is so fragile that anything that the bulk supplier does impacts directly on end users,” Adam said.

“In a normal situation, we should not be feeling the impacts. Our reservoirs should have bulk storage to get us through these maintenance periods, but we don’t. We do not have that at all.”

Half of Joburg’s reservoirs are leaking, and some others are on bypass, so they cannot store sufficient water supply to minimise the impact of changes from Rand Water on end users.