Lessons from Medellín: How Johannesburg Can Transform Its Urban Challenges

The city of Johannesburg, the largest in South Africa, is increasingly struggling to fulfill even its most essential functions, including supplying clean water and electricity, maintaining roads, and ensuring citizen safety. It exhibits the symptoms of a failing urban environment: deteriorating financial oversight, an increasing wage bill, unstable political coalitions, and rapid turnover among mayors.

However, merely outlining these issues does not equate to a proper diagnosis. Without a clear diagnosis, no renewal project can get underway.

For the past thirty years, my research has concentrated on the challenges faced by government in post-apartheid South Africa. I have dedicated years to local governance, having served as an activist against apartheid and as part of the team that developed the White Paper on local government in 1998.

In a recently released paper titled “The Crisis of Johannesburg: An Agenda for Institutional Reform,” commissioned by the independent think tank Centre for Development and Enterprise, I examined the city’s governance, the reasons for its significant decline over the past decade, and potential solutions.

I contend that the traditional assessment—that Johannesburg’s crisis stems solely from poor governance and weak leadership—is inadequate.

The underlying issue is institutional and legal in nature. I propose that the root of the problem in the city, much like in other municipalities across the country, is that the administrative powers exist merely in name. All real authority resides with the council, leaving the city manager without the inherent power to hire staff or make operational decisions.

In proposing solutions, I draw lessons from Medellín, the second largest city in Colombia. Once officially known as the most dangerous city in the world, its recovery hinged on a city government capable of integrating security, investment, and efficient utility services.

The revitalization of Johannesburg will depend on adopting a similar methodology. Its utilities—City Power, Johannesburg Water, and the waste management provider Pikitup—must gain genuine operational independence. Johannesburg must decide whether it will utilize its utilities for the city’s reconstruction, as well as confront the political and criminal entities that may oppose such efforts.

The emergence of a mega-city

Over the last three decades, Johannesburg has evolved into a vast metropolitan area incorporating various towns and municipalities, with the objective of forming a new city as a metropolitan authority pooling resources across historically inequitable regions.

The city was also restructured under the iGoli 2002 plan, reorganizing major service functions into corporatized entities.

• The electricity department transformed into City Power, a wholly-owned company of the city.
• The water department became Johannesburg Water and was initially managed by the French company Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux.
• Pikitup was created as the municipal entity responsible for waste collection and cleaning services.

The rationale was that these functions represented substantial technical operations necessitating management as such—requiring dedicated leadership, clear responsibilities, competent staff, and financial accountability.

These reforms faced controversy from the outset. The South African Municipal Workers Union and the non-profit organization Anti-Privatisation Forum opposed them, viewing them as concessions to neoliberalism.

Johannesburg has never clarified how these utilities should interact with the city administration in terms of governance and financial decision-making. Consequently, a hybrid arrangement has emerged. While the utilities are expected to operate like businesses, many critical functions they rely on are centralized and politically contested. Areas such as billing, treasury, cash allocation, staffing, procurement, and capital expenditure have never been insulated from broader municipal instability.

These utilities had enough autonomy to diffuse responsibility but lacked sufficient independence to secure their own operations.

The core issue is political.

The Municipal Systems Act, enacted in 2000, established the role of municipal manager, appointed by the council. Yet the act did not delineate a clear division between political direction and administrative authority. Councils remain heavily involved in appointments and senior administrative organization. Executive mayors, mayoral committees, boards, and entity executives all have roles, but accountability is fragmented.

Since the coalition period commenced in 2016, following the African National Congress’s loss of its majority in the city council, the administrative landscape has deteriorated further.

Over the past decade, the city has frequently been divided among coalition partners, each treating departments or entities as personal domains. This has influenced appointments, boards, procurement, and operational decisions.

The end result has been the transformation of municipal institutions into political assets. Utilities, which should serve as technical services, have become venues for patronage, rent extraction, and factional control.

Medellín serves as a valuable reference point in this context.

What fixing problems took in Medellín

In the 1980s and 1990s, Medellín was infamously known as the world’s most violent city. By 2013, however, it emerged as a hallmark of innovation.

Medellín’s resurgence necessitated the reinstatement of public authority in regions where powerful criminal organizations had marginalized the state. The government needed to become visible and accountable where it had previously been absent or predatory.

The municipal utility, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, played an integral role in this transformation. It provided electricity, water, sanitation, and telecommunications, generated revenue, maintained infrastructure, and supported the city’s broader investment initiatives. This demonstrated that a public utility could be both commercially responsible and socially beneficial. It could efficiently deliver services, create city revenue, and facilitate investment in underserved areas.

This serves as a key lesson for Johannesburg. Utilities become problematic when they are poorly managed, overly politicized, or lack secure cash flows, competent leadership, or defined authority.

Medellín’s experience illustrates that utilities can contribute to a city’s revitalization if they are equipped with:

• shareholder agreements with the city
• billing and treasury protocols outlining revenue collection and cash allocation
• publicly measurable performance targets
• protection from political interference in staffing, operations, and procurement.

Vested interests will resist change

This will not be merely an administrative challenge. Revitalization in Johannesburg will face opposition from those benefiting from the present disorder. Some of these stakeholders are entrenched in formal politics, while others serve on boards, in entities, or within departments and supply chains. Others may operate through contractors, local brokers, or criminal networks.

A reform initiative that threatens these established arrangements should anticipate resistance. This may manifest as litigation, obstruction, leaks, misinformation, labor unrest, sabotage of infrastructure, intimidation of officials, and violence at worksites and depots.

Johannesburg’s recovery will require both professionalization and enforcement. It will necessitate a professional and relatively autonomous administration alongside a policing strategy capable of safeguarding infrastructure, officials, contractors, and communities from organized disruption.

This does not imply militarizing municipal governance but recognizing that effective service delivery depends upon assertive public authority.

Ivor Chipkin, Associate Lecturer, University of Pretoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.