Johannesburg’s decline has been exacerbated by corruption that 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. Dysfunction creates opportunities for emergency procurement. Those who benefit from failure therefore have an interest in perpetuating it.

This is the warning put forward in Time for Action – Corruption in Joburg, a new report launched by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) today, the fifth in CDE’s Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s growth engine series.

“The diagnosis is stark,” said CDE executive director Ann Bernstein. “Johannesburg is not suffering only from weak administration, poor maintenance or ordinary municipal incompetence. It has also developed a ‘crime-council ecosystem’ in which political, business and criminal interests intersect around the machinery of local government and benefit from dysfunction.”

The report draws on research commissioned by CDE from the Global Initiative Against Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and released simultaneously. That report describes overlapping networks operating around municipal procurement, appointments and services such as electricity, water and property.

The GI-TOC research shows how political influence over municipal entities and senior appointments is used to facilitate tender manipulation. In addition, corrupt insiders collude with criminals involved in infrastructure theft, sabotage and building hijacking.

“Violence and intimidation are used extensively to protect corrupt interests and threaten investigators, whistleblowers, politicians and legitimate businesses,” said Bernstein.

This system has flourished and deepened alongside persistent institutional instability, and in particular, the lack of continuity of metropolitan governments, while, at the same time, processes used to ensure transparency and accountability have been weakened.

Report by the Centre for Development and Enterprise