When delivering his budget speech this week, finance minister Enoch Godongwana took the trouble to single out Johannesburg as an example of endemic financial mismanagement in the local government sector — which, in the city’s case, was largely at the heart of the metro’s worsening water crisis.
He told journalists that those who run Johannesburg “can’t provide any basic services at the moment, whether it’s water or anything else”, adding that the government “cannot remain a spectator” and would have to intervene to turn things around in South Africa’s economic hub. Treasury officials and the city were already in talks to seek solutions, he said.
Godongwana warned that if the rife practice of collecting revenue from basic services and then diverting the funds to unrelated functions continues, maintenance backlogs would increase, resulting in the eventual collapse of critical infrastructure systems.
The minister’s threat to intervene in Johannesburg is to be welcomed by a crisis-weary citizenry. Yet it will be met with a healthy dose of scepticism by some, because previous pledges to resolve the city’s problems, including from the Presidency, have borne little fruit. Instead, services and infrastructure continued to deteriorate.
Ultimately, government intervention will constitute only a temporary, emergency solution. In the long term, Johannesburg, and other cities and towns, can be fixed only by a professional civil service, insulated from the whims and power battles of political parties.
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