Johannesburg's problems can be solved

... but it’s a long journey to fix South Africa’s economic powerhouse

- PHILIP HARRISON, GRAEME GOTZ, LORENA NUNEZ CARRASCO, and RASHID SEEDAT

SOUTH AFRICAN president Cyril Ramaphosa met senior leaders of Johannesburg and Gauteng, the province it’s located in, in March 2025 to discuss ways to arrest the steep decline in South Africa’s largest city.

Ramaphosa announced a two-year-long presidential intervention to tackle some of the city’s most pressing issues. It is to be led by the Presidential Johannesburg Working Group with eight multi-stakeholder and cross-governmental workstreams.

Johannesburg was established 130 years ago, where the world’s largest-ever gold deposits were discovered. It grew rapidly in the early 20th century, and became the country’s economic heartland and largest population centre.

Like all South African cities, it was deeply scarred by apartheid policies. People were divided by racially defined groups. Good services and a strong economy benefited a minority, and a black majority were pushed into impoverished ghettos.

However, for about the first two decades of post-apartheid rule from 1994, Johannesburg led the country with innovation and progressive change. It pioneered the new local government system, institutional reforms, new practice on city strategy and planning, pro-poor service delivery, and modern transport infrastructure.

Today, however, the city is in a dire state.

Over the past decade—roughly coinciding with the arrival of messy coalition governance in 2016—sound political leadership, administrative stability, and financial management have crumbled. Underinvestment in infrastructure maintenance has led to collapsing services.

Public trust is deteriorating among increasingly frustrated communities. This was evident in local election results. It also shows up in recent data released by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory on public trust in local government.