In Johannesburg, institutional failure has become profitable.

Broken infrastructure creates contracts to repair it. Stolen cables have to be replaced. Neglected buildings become opportunities for hijacking syndicates and criminal landlords.

The worse the city functions, the more opportunities there are for people positioned to profit from its dysfunction. And in many areas, people who benefit from municipal failure have acquired the ability to perpetuate it.

Consider water.

Johannesburg has spent hundreds of millions of rands on water tankers in recent years. They are indispensable during genuine emergencies. But once emergency water provision becomes a substantial business, perverse incentives begin to drive behaviour.

What appears to be a “water mafia” involving contractors, criminals and corrupt insiders has emerged not only to take advantage of opportunities that arise when communities need emergency supplies, but to make sure those opportunities keep on coming. Pipes are sabotaged, repairs are obstructed and tankers dump water before they get to their destination, necessitating multiple trips. Every broken pipe becomes a potential contract. Every dry reservoir becomes a business opportunity.

The same perverse incentives appear around electricity.

A system in which destruction reliably generates emergency procurement creates incentives that a serious, reforming administration has to confront.

Johannesburg’s corruption crisis cannot be understood simply as theft from an otherwise functioning municipality. Corruption and institutional decline reinforce each other.

Bad governance creates opportunities for extraction. Extraction makes government worse. Worsening governance creates more failures and emergencies. These, in turn, create yet more opportunities for extraction. That is a vicious cycle — and Johannesburg has to break it.

But how?

Writing more rules, tightening procedures and exhorting public servants to behave ethically is of limited value when people inside the system have both the incentive and the power to circumvent them.

We have to change the economics of corruption by reducing opportunities and raising the risk of detection and sanction.

One way of doing this is to adopt radical transparency as a guiding principle in the Johannesburg procurement process.

The city spends about R20bn a year buying goods and services, but the vast majority of that spending is hidden from any meaningful public scrutiny. Publishing the name of the winning bidder is not nearly enough. By then, the crucial decisions may already have been manipulated.

Much more transparency is needed.

The city should, for example, publish bid specifications, the names of all bidders and their beneficial owners, as well as the scores they get in bid evaluations. Any disqualifications, deviations from normal procedures, and the identities of major subcontractors should also be published.

Then, as the contract unfolds, the city should publish contract variations, invoices, payments and proof of delivery.

This would dramatically widen the number of people capable of detecting corruption. Competitors would know when prices look inflated. Engineers would know what projects should cost. Journalists would be able to identify links between suppliers and officials or when contracts go to the same dodgy firms again and again.

Of course, these steps will not eliminate all corruption. Nothing will do that because organised criminal networks adapt to changes that even the most prescient and well-meaning officials implement. As one opportunity for extraction closes, another will be pursued.

Dealing with that requires a much better response from the criminal justice system and much more determined and strategic use of civil litigation.

Johannesburg cannot itself prosecute organised crime. That is the job of the police and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). But the city could become far better at identifying the networks doing the most damage, building coherent cases, preserving evidence, and pursuing those remedies it controls. And it can mobilise those national institutions, providing them with information and evidence that they need to prosecute.

Contracts that have been impugned can be cancelled by the city. Money can be recovered through litigation. The cosy relationships between suppliers and corrupt officials can be disrupted. Corrupt officials can be disciplined and fired.

Critically, civil proceedings can sometimes succeed even where criminal prosecutions are slow or impossible.

Above all, investigations must lead somewhere.

All too often, anti-corruption advocates propose approaches built on the idea that corrupt people can be persuaded that corruption is wrong and that they should stop doing it. Corrupt people already know that what they are doing is wrong — they are not going to stop even if we ask them nicely.

To reduce corruption, we have to make it harder to hide, reduce the profits available from municipal failure, and dramatically increase the chances that people who steal from Johannesburg lose their contracts, their jobs, their money or their liberty.

For too long, the decline of Johannesburg has generated opportunities for those able to exploit it. The city needs to reverse that equation.

Before you vote in November, ask mayoral candidates how they are going to stop corruption in Johannesburg.

Bernstein is executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE). This article is based on ‘Time for Action – Corruption in Joburg’, the fifth report in ‘Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s Growth Engine’, a new CDE series.

This article was published on Sunday Times