THE GATHERING CITIES EDITION: When ‘it must be Sunday’ becomes a punchline, the joke is on City leadership

When suburbs are forced to build ‘shadow municipalities’ to sustain security, water and power service delivery, City leadership has failed – The Gathering: Cities Edition probes whether metros can be saved.

I’ve lived in Risidale, Ward 88, Johannesburg, for 12 years now. I chose it, like a lot of people choose these older, leafier Johannesburg suburbs, because it was quiet. Not exciting. Just quiet, close to everything and, at the time, reliably serviced. That last bit wasn’t really among our criteria when we were looking. We expected water from the taps, the streetlights to work, rubbish to be collected, potholes to be filled – you know, the stuff your rates and taxes should logically cover.

I arrived in Johannesburg in 2002, a migrant worker from KwaZulu-Natal. Then, the potholes weren’t like this. The power stayed on. Water pressure was consistent, not something you learnt to plan a shower around.

I’m not describing a golden age. Joburg has always had inequality snaking through its streets, always had suburbs that got everything and townships that got nothing, and that injustice long predates the current administration. But the formal service delivery that existed for those who did get services has degraded markedly over the past two decades. And those who did not, live in even worsening conditions.

In Ward 88, we lose power almost weekly and for stretches that regularly run to more than 12 hours.

The potholes on our roads sometimes get filled, but when the first decent rain arrives the patch job is washed away.

Crime is a low, constant hum of anxiety that most of us have responded to not by demanding better policing, but by paying privately for security companies to do a job that used to sit with the state. We have built a shadow municipality out of debit orders for security, back-up water supply, solar power and area upkeep.

The temptation is to blame the municipal worker who answers the callout or the truck that arrives late. That would be wrong. Responsibility logically sits with City leadership – both administrative and political – and with the financial mismanagement, coalition instability and decades of deferred infrastructure maintenance that have compounded under their watch.

Joburg’s finances make it hard to fund the work of fixing infrastructure before it fails. But that doesn’t explain a pothole that reappears in the same spot every year.

But Jozi still works in places, and it works best where it has stopped waiting for the municipality alone to fix things.

In Risidale, a resident-funded initiative called Let’s Work has taken on the unglamorous job of keeping the area clean and functional. Its founder has also built the kind of relationship with the City that gets problems escalated and, with patience, resolved.

These parallel structures shouldn’t have to exist. But residents have learnt that waiting for services would be like waiting for Godot.