Last Tuesday the Rand Club — South Africa’s oldest private club and one of the last businesses in Joburg’s inner city — hosted a large multinational company in one of its upstairs dining rooms.
But as silverware clinked on crystal for the opening speech, darkness descended. As it turned out, the club’s generator, which had been running for weeks, had finally overheated.
“There has been no electricity in Marshalltown for the past two weeks, so it’s been difficult to keep the club running normally,” says Brian McKechnie, chair of the club. “Most of the buildings in the city, like ours, pump water from the roof, so without power, we’ve also suffered the inevitable knock-on effect of having no water.”
It’s a grim state of affairs for the historic club, founded by Cecil John Rhodes’ Randlords in 1887, a year after gold was discovered, and built using £10 paid by each of the first members. The Rand Club describes itself as “the beating heart of Joburg’s historic business district”, and it remains so, even as others have fled. Anglo American, for instance, vacated its Main Street headquarters in 2021 for the suburban calm of Rosebank. Other than the banks, little sign of corporate life remains.
Yet this dystopian scene is at odds with the upbeat narrative of “inner-city revival” that mayor Dada Morero trots out at functions.
“The banks run generators — but we can’t afford to keep the club’s generators running seven days a week,” says McKechnie. “Unless there’s a pre-booked function, the club is now running its generator for half the day. For us, it’s bad; we’ve had to make backup plans. But for the small shops trying to survive in the city, it’s been catastrophic.”
The blackouts have cut across the inner city, from Bree City Mall on Rahima Moosa Street to the Greatermans building on Commissioner Street, which has been converted into affordable housing apartments.
Rent boycotts
Angela Rivers, executive head of the Johannesburg Property Owners & Managers Association, which represents investors and landlords in the inner city, says there was power for probably only about one week in August.
“The central substation broke down, was fixed, then stopped again a day later after a fire broke out,” she tells the FM. “The small businesses that can are just leaving.”
Rivers says it’s as bad for landlords who own affordable housing apartments where people pay R2,800–R5,200 a month. “We’re seeing a wave of rent boycotts as residents blame the landlords rather than City Power for the outages.”
Khadija Tilly, who works for the nonprofit Madressa Anjuman Islamia of Kholvad South Africa on Market Street, says city officials couldn’t care less.
“Morero walks around kicking out illegal immigrants and talking big while ignoring the people who live here. President Cyril Ramaphosa says they’ll fix the city, but nothing happens,” she tells the FM. “What about the people living here whose kids are writing exams and who can’t keep food in their fridges?”
For Tilly, it’s the dissonance between the politicians’ soothing promises ahead of the November local government election and the grimy reality of everyday life in the places they’ve forgotten that speaks most eloquently about their priorities.
Morero, for instance, has spent recent weeks walking the streets as part of his “high-impact service delivery programme”. His achievements so far: removing “illegal generators”, hassling hawkers, “issuing compliance notices to noncompliant businesses” and removing an “illegal billboard”.
In other words, rather than “fixing local government”, as the ANC’s election slogan promises, its deployees are bullying hawkers.
With little hint of irony, Morero vowed that his “high-impact” programme would “continue until we get the inner city right”. He added that “safe, clean and compliant buildings are essential to restoring investor confidence, stimulating economic growth and creating an environment where legitimate businesses can thrive”.
Maybe if those “legitimate businesses” put up an illegal billboard, he’d notice.
For the Rand Club, the story gets worse, as the city that can’t provide it with power or water is squeezing it for an 88% hike in its rates bill.
This is because, last year, the city suddenly placed a sky-high value on the club of R23.8m — nearly three times the R8m of two years earlier — which pushed its monthly utility bill to R182,000.
The Rand Club will argue its case in court in November, but McKechnie says it’s galling to hear Morero speak of the “progress” in rebuilding Joburg’s inner city when the disintegration of infrastructure is so visceral.
“The people who live here and the retailers who operate here have no political capital, so it’s easy to ignore them. But what is happening shows just how little these politicians actually care for the people who pay their salaries,” he says.
Value destruction
Evidently, squeezing occupants for more cash to pay salaries is the main concern. Joburg, for instance, plans to spend R24.3bn paying staff this year — more than double the R10.3bn spent a decade ago and far outstripping inflation.
For Rivers, this is a central problem. “The reality is that there are just too many staff members in Joburg, and this money is then not being used to fix infrastructure,” she says.
This encapsulates South Africa’s value-destroying municipal conundrum: employee numbers have exploded, but rather than buying competence and improvement, the city has bought decay and ineptitude.
Morero might be the man on the poster with the big red nose and clown feet, but he’s just a symptom of a system that rewards mediocrity and punishes nobody for failure.
