Johannesburg Matters: Time for Action – Corruption in Joburg
Report 5: Time for Action – Corruption in Joburg focuses on what the City could do to protect itself from enemies within.- Corruption robs the city of the resources needed to maintain and expand infrastructure. Worse, it has been exploited by people who profit from keeping the City broken: infrastructure theft creates contracts for repairs, water failures create demand for tankers, and dysfunction creates opportunities for emergency procurement.
- There is a powerful ‘crime-council ecosystem’ in Johannesburg. Political, business and criminal interests intersect and benefit from the growing dysfunctionality.
- Political influence over boards and senior management enables tender manipulation. Corrupt officials cooperate with criminals involved in infrastructure theft, sabotage and building hijacking; others engage in extortion. Violence and intimidation protect these interests and threaten investigators, whistleblowers, politicians and legitimate businesses.
- A new Johannesburg administration should act quickly to build an anti-corruption system that can withstand resistance, prevent opportunities for corruption, detect wrongdoing, investigate it effectively, disrupt the networks behind it, punish those responsible and protect those who expose it.
- The report sets out ten immediate priorities for a new administration to make corruption harder to commit and conceal, easier to investigate and more likely to result in arrests.
- Johannesburg desperately needs leaders committed to dealing with corruption and criminality in and around the administration and its politics.
- The report draws on research commissioned by CDE from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Joburglary: Assessing the Crime-Council Ecosystem in the City of Johannesburg (October 2026), see below.
