Power to the people — Communities step up as municipalities fail

As potholes multiply, public spaces deteriorate and municipal services falter, South Africans are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. As part of Daily Maverick’s annual The Gathering, four civic leaders discussed what happens when communities stop waiting for the government to fix their cities and start doing it themselves.

Daily Maverick associate editor Ferial Haffajee opened the discussion with a story about Mayfair in Johannesburg, where her late mother lived. Spending time in the area as her mother aged, Haffajee found herself counting hundreds of potholes and noticing traffic lights that no longer worked. But what struck her was not the neighbourhood’s decline.

“What I found is that people weren’t sitting still,” she said on Friday, 11 September.

That spirit of civic action ran through the panel discussion, as panellists shared their different ways of responding to failing municipalities.

For Jozi My Jozi Group CEO Bea Swanepoel, the answer was to build what she called a “coalition of the willing”, where residents, businesses and other partners worked alongside the government to make practical improvements.

“Meaningful change can only come through collaboration,” Swanepoel said.

One of Jozi My Jozi’s first projects was to restore lighting on the Nelson Mandela Bridge. “It was a very unsafe bridge for students to cross,” she said, describing the “horrible” things that had been happening there before the intervention.

Working with Ledvance and corporate funders such as Absa and the Maharishi Invincibility Institute, the initiative retrofitted the bridge with an autonomous, solar-powered LED system.

Swanepoel said the bridge became a “beacon of hope” during load shedding, when large parts of the city were plunged into darkness for hours at a time.

She also pointed to a shift in who is showing up. “What’s been incredible to see is the youth involvement,” Swanepoel said. “The universities and students are stepping up and saying, ‘This is enough. How can we help you guys?’”

For Yunus Chamda, the coordinator of the Joburg Crisis Alliance, civic action is less about filling the gaps left by the government and more about pressuring those in power to respond to community concerns.

“When the city isn’t listening, protest action is a response,” Chamda said.

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The alliance helped push for the reopening of a Joburg Library through public protest, a campaign that included getting residents to donate books to the closed library, with petitions tucked inside the covers. The stunt generated enough publicity to help force the issue.

Chamda argued that South Africans had grown too comfortable handing responsibility to government once democracy arrived.

“We shouldn’t have done that,” he said, adding that citizens need to hold power to account and create a culture of ethical leadership.

Asad Gaffar, chairperson of the eThekwini Ratepayers Protest Movement, is taking a different approach, as the organisation prepares to contest the upcoming local government elections.

“These initiatives should be done by government,” he said, adding that civic groups had been left with no choice but to get involved owing to the current government’s failure to respond to the community’s cries.

He was critical of the cost of municipal failure for ordinary households.

“People have to decide between food and paying the municipality,” Gaffar said, pointing to rising tariffs for services residents could barely afford.

“The municipality isn’t using the budget correctly,” he said. “Why are we allowing them to do so?”

For Gaffar, the answer lies in confronting corruption head-on rather than working around it. His movement is hoping to win about 10 council seats in the November elections, but Gaffar said the number almost didn’t matter.

“We hope to celebrate the elections,” he said, adding that even a single seat would be enough for the movement to start using its power.

In Cape Town, Tim Harris, a former DA MP and the co-founder and executive chairperson of the Mission for Inner City Cape Town, described a different kind of reclamation project.

More than 400 businesses closed or left Cape Town’s inner city during the Covid-19 pandemic, Harris said, a shock that pushed him and his co-founder to act. They approached a range of sponsors to build a public-private fund capable of unlocking Capetonians’ own vision for the space.

“It is important to our history,” Harris said of the inner city, framing the mission’s work as continuous with a legacy of resistance, as well as the community’s resistance to apartheid.

Rather than waiting for the government to solve every problem, Harris said the mission thought in terms of “binding constraints”, asking how citizens and businesses could unlock potential within the limits a city actually faces, instead of pretending those limits didn’t exist.

He was also candid about a broader failure of leadership, arguing that many South African leaders were too self-conscious to ask for help. He said initiatives such as his were stepping into that gap.

Despite their differing approaches, all panellists agreed on one thing: citizens cannot simply wait for the government to act. DM