Welcome to Joburg... bring your own water and electricity

Johannesburg does not need another season of lyrical collapse. It needs a government that stops raiding utilities, stops treating tariff hikes as a substitute for management, and stops asking the poor to underwrite elite failure, writes Ido Lekota.

As local government election season gathers its posters, slogans, and counterfeit optimism, Johannes-burg once again performs its favourite civic trick: pretending that a city can be governed by branding. The billboards will soon bloom, the speakers will thunder, and candidates will speak as though the city known as Egoli still deserves the old name. But for many residents, the City of Gold now feels more like the City of Interruptions—a place where taps go dry, lights die, and daily life is arranged around failure.

Veteran journalist Ferial Haffejee’s recent interview cut through the campaign fog re-minding us that the struggle prize was never a poster, a ribbon-cutting or a summit makeover. It was access to water and elec-tricity, the basic infrastructure of dignity. Her account of residents including her late 89-year-old mother, living without power while people carry water on their heads from tanks is not just a moving anecdote; it is a portrait of a city where survival planning has replaced citizenship.

This collapse is also a story of energy poverty, though politicians prefer to call it something softer, as if the poor are merely “underserved” rather than system-atically trapped. Energy poverty means households spend too much of their income on electricity or cannot access

reliable energy at all, and in Joburg it is now visible in the way residents are forced to budget for outages, backup-charging, candles, paraffin, and extra transport costs that come with disrupted routines. The burden falls hardest on low income households, especially those already hit by rising pre-paid charges and tariff increases.

A 2025 study by the University of Pre-toria's School of Public Management and Administration using General Household Survey data from Gauteng and the Western Cape found that multi-dimensional energy poverty has a direct and significant impact on household in-security, with income as the strongest mediating factor. In practical terms: as energy cost rises, households cut back on food quantity and quality to afford electricity units.

The study also found that the problem is par-ticularly acute for pre-paid users, who make up the majority of low-income township households. Empirical analysis also showed that prepaid metering increases the probab-ility of hunger by 3.8 for families, 4.7% for adults, and 4.4% for children, because the advance payment requirement forces trade-offs before the month’s needs are known.

That burden becomes even crueler when the city frames higher charges as if they were a civic duty rather than a transfer of risk from a failing municipality to poor residents. The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has argued that a new pre-paid electricity surcharge was essentially a lazy fundraising exercise that punishes the paying public while the city fails to address its own inefficiencies, and it noted that the indigent register covers only a small fraction of those who need free basic services. In other words, the people most exposed to energy poverty are being asked to subsidise the city’s in-ability to manage power properly.

OUTA executive Julius Kleynhans has been blunt about tariff hikes: when the city is performing poorly, cutting, neither waste nor political excess, it is very difficult to jus-tify asking residents for more. That argument matters because the city’s budget story is now a familiar one—rising charges, declining trust, and a municipal machine that appears to expect compliance from res-idents it no longer serves reliably.

The 2026/27 budget kept the pressure on households. Water and sanitation charges were set to rise sharply, and the water demand management levy for household rose to R107.74 a month, up from R65.08 before tax. Water justice and advocacy or-ganisation WaterCan warned that the increase for residential users amounted to about 65.6% and warned that the city had still not made clear how the levy is used over the medium term or how it supports capital expenditure for water the water system.

That is why the tariff debate in Joburg is not a technical dispute over percentages. It is a moral argument about who pays for col-lapse: the municipality that mismanages infrastructure, or the residents who must queue, ration, and improvise around it. Wa-terCAN’s position is that “the answer should not be poor households carrying the full cost while the city continues to leak the money, leak water and leak credibility”.

The most damning recent detail is the money removed from Johannesburg Wa-ter’s account. On the last day of June, the City of Johannesburg took R3.4 billion out of Johannesburg Water’s account and left the entity with zero balance, only returning the money on 9 July, leaving Johannesburg unable to settle R1.8 billion in creditor debts because of the sweep, and reports said the city had reportedly taken more than R6 billion from the utility’s account over the current term of office.

That is not merely bad budgeting. It is a political method. The city treats the util-ity as a cash cow, drains its revenue, and then asks the public to accept higher tar-iffs in the name of sustainability. The result is predictable: a service provider that cannot plan, contractors that go unpaid, projects that stall, and residents told to be patient while the city

The tariff debate in Joburg is not a technical dispute over percentages. It is a moral argument about who pays for collapse.

dismantles the very institution meant to supply their water.

WaterCAN’s demands are both simple and devastatingly reasonable. It wants the city to disclose how much is owed to Johannes-burg Water contractors and service providers, publish a credible 30-day creditor payment and recovery plan, end the sweep-ing of the utility’s account, and ring fence all water and sanitation revenue so that money collected for water is used for water. Meanwhile WaterCAN’s collaborator and its partners have also pushed the city to publish its Financial Turnaround Plan for public scrutiny and to explain how it will meet service delivery targets.

Those demands are not activist decoration; they are an emergency response to a city where institutional discipline has been re-placed by improvisation. If water revenue can be siphoned off to plug other holes, then residents are effectively paying twice: once through tariffs, and again through the breakdown of the service itself. That is why civil society’s insistence on ring-fencing is so important—it is one of the few tools left for preventing the city from eating its own plumbing.

The G20 build-up briefly offered a different Johannesburg: scrubbed pavements, stra-tegic clean-ups, and a political class eager to be seen rescuing what it had long neg-lected. Reporting on the summit preparations described a rushed makeover designed to present a more orderly city to visiting global leaders, with President Cyril Ramaphosa joining the clean-up efforts that were heavily on symbolism and light on structural repair. It was the municipal equi-valent of wearing a tie to the doctor hoping the X-ray would come back improved.

But once the summit spectacle passed, the older Johannesburg returned with rude familiarity. The outages resumed, the water problems persisted, and the city settled back into the patterns residents know too well: unstable supply, emergency notices, and a governing style that mistakes temporary optics for durable reform. That is the real insult in the G20 era—not that the city was cleaned, but that the cleaning was treated as substitute for repair.

If the upcoming local elections mean anything, they should force one question: Who is serious about rebuilding the city, and who is merely shopping for office? Haffejee’s criticism of broken politics, political entrepreneurs, and coalition deals based on self-preservation rather than principle goes to the heart of the problem. So does the growing argument from civic groups that residents must use their vote strategically, not sentimentally, and demand coalitions with clear min-imum principles on water, electricity, budgets, and accountability.

Johannesburg does not need another season of lyrical collapse. It needs a gov-ernment that stops raiding utilities, stops treating tariff hikes as a substitute for management, and stops asking the poor to underwrite elite failure. Until that hap-pens, every campaign poster will be a billboard-sized joke: a promise to deliver the very things the city has already taken away.