Johannesburg: A city in decline?

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Welcome to the Carlton Centre, once the tallest building on the African continent. Now, its construction began in 1967 and it was complete in 1973.

[00:00:13]It's the last major development in the inner city for many decades. Now, this highlights just how aged infrastructure is here and in many parts of Johannesburg. To make matters worse, it's hardly replenished or refurbished for many years on end. Now, this leads to the collapsing infrastructure that we're seeing that exposes the decaying city. Now, this plays out in the water crisis that many parts of Johannesburg are currently facing among other crises.

[00:00:43]Now, Professor Philip Harrison believes he has the answer to why the infrastructure has been neglected. The problem we have is that let me say it's not very sexy to maintain infrastructure. You don't cut ribbons if you're maintaining infrastructure.

[00:00:58]That's a challenge. So, politicians would rather see developments as visible developments um that they can show their electorate that they're doing something.

[00:01:10]If you're putting money into maintenance, that's invisible.

[00:01:14]You're not getting political credit.

[00:01:17]So, there's a constant pressure, I think, for for um more rapid, visible results, perhaps for the next uh election.

[00:01:26]And there's less pressure to do the more difficult thing and the longer-term job of maintaining the infrastructure that you already have.

[00:01:36]Adding to the collapsing infrastructure crisis, there are service delivery failures across the city. On top of that, the city's finances are crumbling.

[00:01:46]A day ahead of the state of the city address, Eskom threatened to reduce, interrupt, or plunge the city into darkness over a 5.2 billion rand debt owed to the power utility by the city.

[00:02:00]Weeks before that, the finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, threatened to cut state funding to the city unless it addressed the 2.3 billion rand in wasteful expenditure and also cancel plans to raise the wage bill by nearly 10 billion rand. Uh the funding cuts would possibly see the city being placed under administration ahead of the local government elections.