Governing Gauteng: Colloquium examines the state of local government
Gauteng is South Africa's most populous and wealthiest province, but it is also among the country's most unequal. As the province grapples with persistent challenges in local government, developments in Gauteng often indicate broader trends in South Africa's governance landscape.
These issues came under the spotlight at Governing Gauteng: Practices, Principles, and Possibilities for Local Government, a public colloquium hosted by the Wits University School of Social Sciences at the Wits Theatre on 12 August. The event brought together researchers, policy specialists and practitioners for a day of discussion on the state of local government in the province.
The colloquium was held ahead of the November local government elections, against a backdrop of increasing coalition politics, frequent changes in political leadership in the City of Johannesburg, and ongoing service delivery challenges.
Despite the political context, organisers deliberately kept politicians off the programme. The event did not focus on campaign speeches or political manifestos, but instead examined the practical realities of local governance, including municipal finances, service delivery, infrastructure, policy and planning.
The programme featured three panels, bookended by a welcome address and closing reflections. The first panel, titled "The Changing Shape of Local Governance", examined nearly three decades of local government implementation against the ambitions outlined in the 1996 Constitution and the 1998 White Paper on Local Government. It included the Gauteng City-Region Observatory's (GCRO) Director of Research Strategy, Graeme Gotz, alongside Dr Federica Duca of the Public Affairs Research Institute, Professor Noor Nieftagodien of the Wits History Workshop, and Daily Maverick's Ferial Haffajee, chaired by Professor Loren Landau.
The second panel focused on the mechanics of policy, municipal budgets, and implementation, while the third examined how governance plays out in communities and how government plans interact with the realities experienced by people living, working, and studying across Gauteng.
Together, the discussions highlighted the gap that can emerge between policy ambitions and the everyday realities of local government, while exploring the principles and practices needed to strengthen governance across the province.
Opening the first panel, Gotz offered a deliberately uncomfortable framing of what local government was actually built to do. Rather than simply asking whether the Constitution and the White Paper's stated commitments to democratic, accountable and service-delivering municipalities had been realised, he argued that the more revealing question lies in what those documents left unstated: that local government has always functioned, at its core, as a settlement, development and management business.
Municipalities sell services directly through metered services such as water and electricity, and indirectly through property rates that fund roads, parks and stormwater systems. Revenue from those sales is reinvested in infrastructure, enhancing property values and generating further revenue. This is meant to operate as a virtuous cycle.
This model was inherited, largely intact, from the apartheid era. And it is at the core of the way municipalities across the world function. That democracy was meant to change, Gotz argued, was not the model itself, but who bore its costs and who captured its benefits. Under apartheid, a wealthy white minority externalised the costs of service provision by pushing poorer communities beyond the boundaries and off the budgets of white local authorities. The post-apartheid project inverted that logic through cross-subsidisation, both within and between services, so that wealthier ratepayers would fund the extension of infrastructure into historically underserved areas.
That inversion, Gotz said, largely worked for the first 15 to 20 years of democracy, particularly in Johannesburg, where water networks, roads, housing and parks were extended on a significant scale into the city's poorer southern areas. The strain now being felt, he suggested, stems from the model reaching its structural limits rather than from any sudden collapse. A rising burden has fallen on wealthier ratepayers even as capital replacement and maintenance in those same areas have declined, while new beneficiaries of infrastructure expansion have not been incorporated into the tax base as paying consumers and ratepayers. Gotz cited a decline in the share of Johannesburg households paying for water, from roughly 65% a decade ago to 39% today.
Layered onto that are two decades of stagnant per capita GDP in the city, the economic aftershocks of Covid-19, the financial damage load shedding has done to municipalities' ability to generate a surplus from electricity sales, and a growing pattern of "extended urbanisation," in which households are choosing to invest savings in housing in former homeland areas rather than in the city itself.
The result, in Gotz's framing, is a death spiral rather than the envisaged virtuous development cycle – as revenue falls, municipalities are able to provide fewer services at a high quality, which leads to depleted trust and a declining willingness to pay for services, which in turn leads to weaker revenue and poorer services. Gotz argued that this is where conventional diagnoses go wrong. While leadership changes and institutional capacity-building are not unimportant in the process of fixing local government, they don’t in and of themselves sidestep the deeper structural question of whether cross-subsidisation between wealthy and poorer areas can still be made to work.
"I don't think that solving procurement corruption through a new audit committee, or bringing in a new mayor, is automatically going to solve the fundamental structural challenges of this operating model of local government," he told the panel.