Johannesburg’s next mayor should appoint a Task Force of leaders from across the city to produce an economic vision and strategic proposals for action to drive Johannesburg’s economy to much higher levels of growth and employment.

This would allow the new administration to remain ruthlessly focused on its first priority: fixing the basics. Restoring reliable services, rebuilding municipal institutions, combating corruption and stabilising the City’s finances must come first.

This is the argument put forward in Joburg Needs Faster Growth, published today by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), the sixth report in the CDE series Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s growth engine. It sets out what a new, reform-minded administration should do to get the city’s economy growing again.

Johannesburg’s economy

The city’s residents are getting poorer. When population growth is taken into consideration, average per capita GDP in the city has fallen from R99 858 in 2013 to R95 737 in 2023 (in real terms). By the second quarter of 2026, the city’s official unemployment rate had reached 35.9 per cent, the highest of any metro and above the national rate of 33.6 per cent. During the one-year period ending in June 2026, Johannesburg lost approximately 90 000 jobs, while Cape Town added 57 000.

“Joburg is South Africa’s most important economic centre. Yet over the past decade, the city’s decline has increasingly undermined its economic potential. Failures in municipal government have made Johannesburg a difficult place in which to do business, invest, find employment and build a secure family life,” said CDE executive director Ann Bernstein.

The City’s current approach to economic development is wrong-headed

Rather than focusing on actions designed to attract private investment, the current Johannesburg administration has proposed a growth strategy that looks to the state to reshape the economy via grand plans and expensive, ribbon-cutting projects. Its recently approved Economic Growth Strategy proposes almost 30 projects, with an estimated total cost of R111.47 billion over five years. These include a R1.5 billion international convention centre in Lanseria, a R2.14 billion film and clothing cluster, and a R546 million biodiesel production plant. The City expects private investors and donors to provide 98 per cent of the funding.

Even if the money could be raised, these projects would require considerable capacity to plan, coordinate and oversee. Yet the strategy itself explicitly recognises that its ambitious programme can only be successfully adopted by a City with substantially more resources and administrative capacity than Johannesburg currently possesses. It nevertheless presents its plans as realistic and implementable.

CDE’s Recommendations

1. Fixing the basics will accelerate growth

Restoring reliable basic services would do more than prevent further economic decline. Instead of losing an average of 20.6 hours every three months to power outages – the equivalent of two and a half working days – businesses would be able to operate with fewer disruptions, increasing production and serving more customers. As businesses become more profitable and expand, they create jobs and generate opportunities for other businesses. This would encourage further investment, as businesses are more likely to invest in areas where others are already doing well.

2. Address other pressing obstacles to growth as soon as possible

Crime, housing and public transport are of vital importance to the city’s future. They must get on the priority agenda as soon as the basics of the city are on the road to sustainable recovery.

3. Appoint a Task Force for Johannesburg’s economic future

The Task Force should be small, five to eight leaders drawn from across our society, supported by a small secretariat and funded from the City’s current economic development allocation. It should be appointed as soon as possible and report within one year. Its proposals need to be ambitious and inspiring enough to shape the future, while being realistic about resources, institutions and capabilities.

Some of the important issues the Task Force will need to explore include:

• How can the city build on its strengths? What needs to change for it to once again become a leading centre for mining, finance and technology? Can the manufacturing sector grow again? Can the city become the professional services hub for the continent?

• Can the City lead the way through experiments? The country is making far too little progress on deregulating, eliminating the ‘red tape’ that holds back growth. Why not start with Johannesburg? Why not let Johannesburg lead the way with more privately run special economic zones, some with exclusions from existing legal obligations on business, to test whether this would raise employment growth rates?

• How can large companies interested in helping Johannesburg move from small projects to a more fundamental contribution? A possible model is the Columbus partnership in Ohio, USA, which created a successful and stable business-government partnership at the city level and helped turn around a city that had been in decline.

• Can Johannesburg build a stronger coalition for national economic reforms? If the City worked with the leading companies headquartered in the city, could they together help push national and provincial government to enact reforms more quickly?

South Africa has had to spend much of the past decade fixing what the ANC government broke. It has devoted much less energy to developing a realistic strategy for future growth, including for the role of large metros and, in particular, its most important city.

For now, Johannesburg must devote all its energies and resources to restoring its finances, institutions, infrastructure and services. This is essential to economic recovery, but the City also needs to consider how it will grow over the next generation.

What will drive future investment, employment and prosperity?

“CDE’s proposed Task Force could be an important contribution that helps the mayor decide on an economic growth strategy, and helps bind the city behind ambitious proposals for action and a new vision of hope for all residents,” said Bernstein.

“The focus on fixing what is broken is the right priority for Johannesburg’s next government. But this challenging process ought to be accompanied by serious thinking about the city’s future and how to build a more dynamic economy that is an essential prerequisite for faster and more inclusive growth,” said Bernstein.

Joburg Needs Faster Growth is available here.