---
title: "How to defeat criminals who profit from Joburg’s decline"
description: "A ‘crime-council ecosystem’ that incorporates political, corporate and criminal interests is fuelling Johannesburg’s municipal decline through procurement manipulation and sabotaged infrastructure. To address it, there is a need for radical procurement transparency, protected independent oversight, merit-based political appointments and automatic enforcement mechanisms."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Opinionistas"
author: "Ann Bernstein"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/ann-bernstein/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-11-05-how-to-defeat-criminals-who-profit-from-joburgs-decline/"
published: "2026-11-05T17:04:27"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1252
---

# How to defeat criminals who profit from Joburg’s decline

> A ‘crime-council ecosystem’ that incorporates political, corporate and criminal interests is fuelling Johannesburg’s municipal decline through procurement manipulation and sabotaged infrastructure. To address it, there is a need for radical procurement transparency, protected independent oversight, merit-based political appointments and automatic enforcement mechanisms.

By Ann Bernstein · Published 5 November 2026, 19:04 SAST

## Content

Johannesburg spends around R20-billion a year purchasing goods and services from external service providers. Every procurement decision and every invoice submitted creates an opportunity for money to be diverted through inflated prices, unnecessary contracts, poor project specifications, manipulated scoring, collusive bidding or a supplier’s failure to deliver what was contracted.

Joburg’s decline has been made worse by corruption that diverts money meant to repair bridges, keep streets clean, maintain infrastructure and keep the water running. More troubling still, the City’s decline has become profitable for criminal networks and corrupt elements.

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 keeping the system broken.

That is the uncomfortable conclusion of a new Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) report on corruption in Johannesburg, drawing on research we commissioned from the Global Initiative Against Organised Crime (GI-TOC).

### **The ‘crime-council ecosystem’**

Johannesburg is not suffering only from weak administration, poor maintenance or ordinary municipal incompetence. It has developed what the researchers call a powerful “crime-council ecosystem” in which political, business and criminal interests intersect around the machinery of local government and benefit from its dysfunctionality.

Municipal budgets, procurement systems, appointments and service delivery functions create valuable opportunities for extraction. To exploit these, politically influenced boards and senior appointments facilitate tender manipulation. In other cases, corrupt officials cooperate with external criminals involved in infrastructure theft, sabotage and building hijacking, while other officials engage in outright extortion.

The ecosystem works on three overlapping levels. At the top is the political capture of parts of the municipality, especially municipal entities and their procurement processes. At a second level are hybrid criminal networks involving officials, contractors and criminals operating around services such as electricity, water and property. At the third are more direct forms of criminality, including extortion by municipal employees or contractors. Violence and intimidation cut across all three, protecting corrupt interests and threatening investigators, whistleblowers, politicians and legitimate businesses.

### **Precarious coalitions**

None of this happened by accident. It has flourished and deepened alongside persistent institutional instability.

Since the loss of a stable political majority in 2016, a series of precarious coalitions have led to numerous changes in the mayor, boards of major entities, and bargaining over senior positions with access to resources. At the same time, transparency and accountability mechanisms have been weakened. Procurement processes and necessary emergency deviations are abused, financial reporting is fragmented and investigations have been frustrated.

Consider what happened to the City’s own watchdog. The Group Forensic and Investigation Services (GFIS) was launched in November 2016 to ensure that an effective fraud risk management process was in place.

It investigated more than 6,000 cases involving transactions worth R35-billion, but faced sustained political pushback as well as pressure from criminal groups. In June 2023, the City adopted a report declaring all previous corruption probes and forensic findings conducted by GFIS to be “unlawful, null, and void”, and handed the watchdog’s powers to the City Manager.

### **Protected oversight**

GFIS remains technically operational, but the 2024 assassination of a former forensic investigator has had a chilling effect on internal reporting. One interviewee described the operating environment of GFIS investigators as one of “fear, intimidation and threat to life”. That is what it now costs to do this work in South Africa’s largest city.

It should be obvious by now that Johannesburg’s crime-council ecosystem cannot be solved simply by issuing better rules, demanding improved compliance or asking officials to behave more ethically. As the recent past demonstrates, the institutions responsible for enforcing those rules can be manipulated, ignored or disabled.

There is no shortage of ethical codes, procurement rules, financial regulations or declarations of principle in South African government institutions. It is the gap between rules and outcomes that is the problem.

### **Change of approach**

So the objective cannot be to develop yet another municipal anti-corruption strategy with worthy intentions. A new Johannesburg administration has to change the incentives surrounding corruption by making wrongdoing harder to conceal, easier to detect and much more likely to result in consequences for those who engage in it.

That requires one design principle above all. If and when a new council intent on cleaning up the City and its administration is elected, its anti-corruption programme needs to be premised on the assumption that powerful people, inside and outside the City’s structures, will try to defeat new systems and policies.

Any other assumption would be hopelessly naïve. It follows that reforms should favour mechanisms that are automatic, transparent and externally verifiable over mechanisms that depend heavily on discretionary action by senior officials.

### **Radical transparency**

What would that look like in practice? Make procurement radically transparent, publishing information across the full life cycle of major contracts, from specifications and bid scoring to beneficial ownership, variations, invoices, payments and proof of delivery. Make political appointments harder to manipulate, through open, merit-based processes with published criteria and recorded reasons. Attack the economics of organised crime by reducing the opportunities to profit from infrastructure theft, sabotage and emergency procurement.

The City should also dramatically reduce the scope for emergency procurement, and ensure that all deviations from normal procurement are authorised at a high level and reported to council within 10 days. Where emergency procurement is unavoidable, introduce unpredictability. If a water tanker service is needed during an outage, the supplier could be chosen at random from a panel of pre-qualified firms. That weakens the incentive the so-called water mafias have to damage the pipes in the first place. Companies on those panels should lose their place for repeated failure to deliver at the required standard or price.

### **Consequences**

GFIS needs real independence, with its leadership, budget and investigations protected from political interference. Sensitive investigations should trigger automatic external referral so that completed findings cannot simply disappear. And scarce investigative resources should be concentrated where the damage is greatest: repeat suppliers, politically connected intermediaries, officials linked to multiple suspect transactions, infrastructure syndicates and major procurement corruption.

Investigations must lead to consequences, using disciplinary action, civil recovery and contractual remedies alongside criminal prosecution, so that the City gets rid of the corrupt and recovers losses rather than allowing forensic reports to gather dust.

Protecting those who speak up matters as much as any of this. Nobody will expose organised corruption if doing so may cost them their job, their safety or their life. That means secure reporting channels, protection against retaliation, rapid referral where physical safety is threatened, and carefully designed rewards for information that results in substantial recoveries.

People often say the real problem is culture. But culture follows systems. Systems making corruption difficult, visible and dangerous have more impact on organisational culture than “culture-focused” interventions. Johannesburg needs systems that benefit from good leadership but can also withstand bad leadership and attempts by powerful interests to circumvent or disable them.

The City desperately needs leaders committed to dealing with corruption and criminality in and around the administration and its politics. The dangers of more of the same politics and looting council resources for the next five years are immense.

The November elections are an opportunity to put Johannesburg on a better path. Voters should seize it. Before they vote, people should ask mayoral candidates how they will stop corruption and political appointments in the City. **DM**

*This article is based on*[*Time for Action – Corruption in Joburg*](https://cde.org.za/johannesburg-matters-time-for-action-corruption-in-joburg/)*, the fifth report in Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s Growth Engine, a new Centre for Development and Enterprise series.*