Create new body to fix Johannesburg’s crisis, think tank urges

The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) suggests that creating a Municipal Manager’s Professional Council of South Africa could help cities like Johannesburg reduce poor administration.

According to a report from the think tank, the council would assess people who want to become municipal managers and hold them accountable if they do something wrong.

“This statutory body will be responsible for registering, certifying and disciplining of municipal administrative executives and for vetting candidates for senior municipal positions, while retaining the formal appointment role of elected councils,” reads the report.

The report said for cities like Johannesburg, there should be a clearer division in the institution, distinguishing between council, the political executive and the municipal administration.

It recommends a more stringent process for the appointment of a city manager, which must be transparent and merit based.

“We recommend a stronger delegated authority for the city manager over staffing and administrative decisions, restrictions on political office-bearers issuing operational instructions to officials and renewed five-year terms for appropriately qualified boards of municipal entities.”

The report was commissioned by the CDE to inform its policy series, Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s Growth Engine.

Johannesburg Matters is a series of reports from CDE that sets out to provide analysis and recommendations that a reformed Johannesburg administration could implement after the November 4 local government elections.

The report sets the scene, describing Johannesburg as in crisis. It details failing infrastructure, unreliable water and electricity supply, a mounting maintenance backlog, deteriorating financial controls, a swelling wage bill, unstable coalitions and rapid mayoral turnover which it says has altogether eroded public confidence in the city’s ability to perform even its most basic functions.

We recommend a stronger delegated authority for the city manager over staffing and administrative decisions, restrictions on political office-bearers issuing operational instructions to officials and renewed five-year terms for appropriately qualified boards of municipal entities.

—   Centre for Development and Enterprise report

Penned by Ivor Chipkin, the report refers to accounts of the state of the city, including the mayor’s own 2026 state of the city address, which, he says, detail and register these symptoms.

“This working paper argues that the conventional diagnosis — that Johannesburg’s crisis is simply one of poor governance and weak leadership — is insufficient.”

He argues that the actual deeper problem is institutional and legal.

“The Municipal Systems Act vests the power to appoint the municipal manager and senior managers in the council, rather than in the administration itself, and permits the council to instruct any political office-bearer, councillor or staff member to perform municipal duties.

“The effect is that a genuinely autonomous, professional municipal administration which is insulated from party political control has rarely been able to emerge in Johannesburg.”

He argues that where it has existed, its autonomy has been discretionary and performative, present only for as long as the governing party chooses to act as though it exists.

“Since the onset of coalition governments in 2016, this fragile arrangement has been steadily hollowed out. Municipal utilities and departments have become the spoils of coalition bargaining, driving high turnover among boards and executives, a marked decline in technical skills, and, directly, Johannesburg’s chronic billing failures and deepening fiscal distress.”

Chipkin believes that the crisis of the City of Johannesburg relates institutionally to the failure to allow the sphere of administration to emerge in its own right.

“This is both a legal and political issue, which itself speaks to how local government policymakers in the 1990s, like those developing the Public Service Act of 1994, were deeply suspicious of administrations inherited from the apartheid government, and how they deliberately blurred the lines between political and administrative roles.”

In the report, the CDE examines the legal foundations of what Chipkin calls a metropolitan patronage system.

“It shows how the Municipal Systems Act (MSA) gives municipal councils decisive influence over the appointment of the municipal manager and senior managers directly accountable to that office.

“The law, moreover, blurs the boundary between political authority and administrative execution by allowing councils to define roles, allocate responsibilities and instruct political office-bearers, councillors or staff members to perform municipal duties. The result is not the disappearance of administration as a legal category, but its weakening as a distinct sphere governed by professional norms.”

Chipkin explains that a defining feature of a civil service system is that appointments are governed by objective rules rather than by the discretionary authority of politicians or political parties.

“Where public employment, promotion and associated benefits are allocated through political or personal discretion, the administration is more accurately described as a patronage system.

“In such systems, access to office is mediated by actors such as legislatures, political parties, unions, or economic and social elites, rather than by merit-based procedures.”

The establishment of the CDE proposed Municipal Managers’ Professional Council of South Africa would be a statutory professional council with SAQA-recognised professional designations.