Johannesburg Matters: Powering Joburg’s Turnaround
- The fourth report in the CDE’s Johannesburg Matters series, Powering Joburg’s Turnaround, uses City Power as a case study of what it will take to turn Johannesburg utilities around.
- City Power is the City’s highest revenue-generating entity and faces particularly acute challenges, such as deteriorating infrastructure, severe financial pressure, large electricity losses, weak revenue collection, divided institutional responsibilities and shortages of technical and management capacity.
- These problems reinforce one another. Weak leadership and limited autonomy constrain decision-making; electricity losses and poor revenue collection deepen the financial crisis; and deteriorating finances reduce City Power’s ability to maintain infrastructure and rebuild technical capacity.
- The next administration must appoint capable leadership, clarify and enforce the ring-fencing of City Power’s revenue, radically improve revenue collection, and use transparent, performance-based agreements to bring in private capital, technical expertise and management capacity.
- Although these recommendations are designed to restore City Power to operational and financial stability, several of the underlying principles could also guide the reform of Johannesburg Water and Pikitup. Both face ageing infrastructure, strained finances, fragmented responsibilities, limited autonomy and weak governance.
- CDE argues that the idea of collapsing City Power and other entities back into the City administration, as proposed by some mayoral candidates, would only change where the functions sit, without addressing the problems that have left the utilities unable to deliver. And it would bog down the entire city administration in a very big restructuring process for years when what is required is the urgent restoration of reliable service delivery.
- The state of the City’s utilities, and what should be done to fix them, should be part of the debate about Johannesburg’s future. Parties and candidates seeking to govern the City should be pressed to explain how they will restore reliable electricity, water and refuse collection, and how they will rebuild the institutions responsible for delivering them.
- This report draws on a specially commissioned CDE report which is available in the link below, Fix City Power Johannesburg (September 2026) by Chris Yelland and Linsey Dyer.
