They play politics. Joburg pays the price.
Last week, Ferial Haffajee wrote an article highlighting the crisis and mismanagement of Johannesburg. Once the beating heart of the continent's economy, Joburg is now on life support and time is running out.
Roads explode. Water stops flowing. Power vanishes without warning, separate from load shedding. And the people meant to fix it? They're too busy playing musical chairs in council chambers while the city crumbles outside the window.
In 2023, the Auditor-General found that Johannesburg lost a staggering R21.8-billion to waste, irregular deals and unauthorised spending. That's more than a quarter of the city's budget.
Gone.
Not into infrastructure. Not into safety. Not into dignity. Gone into the fog of politics, mismanagement and corruption.
And yet, silence.
No uproar. No accountability.
Because the one thing more absent than service delivery … is scrutiny.
Everything good that is happening in Joburg, as Ferial listed, is the result of the stellar work of civil society and residents who care.
The watchdogs are missing. Local journalism – the front line of accountability – has all but disappeared.
Over the past 15 years, the journalism industry has shrunk by an estimated 70%. The worst hit? Local newsrooms. The very ones we need most.
At the same time, service delivery failure has risen exponentially.
See the correlation?
We've got a plan. But we need your help.
Daily Maverick wants to launch a dedicated Johannesburg bureau, staffed with a team of 10 journalists on the ground focused solely on this metro. They will be committed to exposing the rot, spotlighting solutions and making sure no councillor, contractor or city official escapes the consequences of their failures.
Their stories will power a daily, free newsletter for residents, amplifying local issues on our national platform.
This newsletter will remain free for everyone because, with the local government elections around the corner, anyone who has the right to vote should have access to the truth.
Johannesburg doesn't need a miracle; it needs a microphone.
Daily Maverick has a proven track record of exposing State Capture, shaking up national policy and holding the powerful to account. Now we're taking that fight to Joburg's front yard – because it's past time.
Here's the deal:
Despite the public service we provide, we receive no public funding. We need the business community and the public, who understand that our standard of journalism translates into impact and accountability, to support us in this effort.
We need 2,800 of you, our readers who care about Joburg's future, to become Maverick Insider members. Your monthly or annual contributions will go directly to paying the salaries of the journalists at this bureau. If that happens, we'll be able to open the bureau in a month.
It's your choice how much you want to contribute (we suggest R200/month because it works out to about the cost of a cup of coffee a week…). Not a lot, but collectively it's enough.
If you're a business owner in Joburg and want to see the city thrive (and receive the kudos for being part of that), you can get in contact with us below.
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IOL News
3 hours ago
- IOL News
Ramaphosa approves R30 million annual donation cap for political parties in South Africa
President Cyril Ramaphosa doubles up the political party funding. Image: Oupa Mokoena / Independent Newpapers President Cyril Ramaphosa has officially approved significant changes to South Africa's political funding regulations, doubling both the annual cap on private donations and the threshold for disclosure, from R15 million to R30 million. According to a proclamation published in the Government Gazette on August 6, Ramaphosa raised the maximum annual contribution a single individual or entity may donate to a political party. Concurrently, the threshold below which donations are not required to be disclosed has been increased from R100,000 to R200,000. These revisions follow a resolution passed by the National Assembly on May 20, acting on recommendations from Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs. Ramaphosa exercised his authority under the Political Party Funding Act, which grants the president final discretion over such financial thresholds. Civil society organisation My Vote Counts (MVC) has expressed deep concern over the changes, warning that the increased disclosure threshold could open the door to significant undisclosed contributions. The organisation contends that this adjustment weakens transparency and potentially invites undue influence over political parties. 'Raising the ceiling means political parties can now accept R200,000 without disclosure—and a donor can funnel R30 million annually to each party of their choice,' MVC said in a statement, adding that the move risks eroding public trust in democratic processes. The changes come amid ongoing legal proceedings brought by MVC in the Western Cape High Court. The case, heard in February 2025, challenges both the rationality of the donation limits and the constitutionality of vesting final authority in the president to set them. The new determinations follow last year's legal ruling that forced Parliament to reinstate the donation ceiling after it was temporarily removed ahead of the 2024 general election. At the time, the court ordered parties to backdate and report donations exceeding the previous R15 million threshold to the Electoral Commission. Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), George Mahlangu, stated last week that all political entities remain accountable under the law. Even if a donation falls below R200,000, parties are still required to reflect it in their annual financial statements, he emphasised. While proponents argue the updated limits reflect economic realities, critics warned they may weaken efforts to curb opaque political financing, especially in a volatile electoral landscape. IOL Politics
Daily Maverick
8 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Purported value of trophy hunting for South Africa is overblown
A robust, peer-reviewed paper poses a problem for hunting apologists, since it shows that the communities they claim are helped by trophy hunting clearly do not want it. New research published in the journal Wildlife Research argues that hunting in South Africa has an impact of $2.5-billion on the economy. North-West University researchers Peet van der Merwe and Andrea Saayman are the authors. Ed Stoddard at Daily Maverick repeated their estimated figure and claimed that 'this is a significantly larger sum than previous estimates, underscoring the importance of hunting to a barely growing economy that faces many challenges.' The researchers also repeat the now-standard trope that the multiplier effects of hunting benefit the rural poor. In a context of high unemployment, they argue, its value should be taken seriously: 'It is especially among the lower-skilled occupations where a large proportion (60.2%) of job opportunities depend on hunting tourism.' In other words, the poor must be grateful for some meat and tiny amounts of revenue (about 6.2% of the total estimated value accrues to low-income earners, according to table 9 in the paper). The standard line among pro-hunting proponents, including Stoddard, is that 'the tracks of its [hunting's] economic and conservation value are in plain sight. There is a reason South Africa's government and other African governments oppose trophy hunting bans sought by mostly non-Africans up north.' The problem for Stoddard and other hunting apologists like Van Der Merwe and Saayman (who employ this narrative that hunting benefits poor communities) is a robust peer-reviewed paper just published in Biological Conservation by Moorhouse and others: 'We interviewed 1,551 households across 12 communities (adjacent to Kruger National Park). The vast majority of respondents supported protecting wildlife and non-consumptive wildlife use and opposed consumptive uses of wildlife.' This sample size is at least 3.74 times bigger than Van Der Merwe and Saayman's. The respondents also have no vested interest in the results and therefore no reason to overstate their case. The authors conclude: 'In the context of trophy hunting, our work provides a vital counterpoint to previous studies, by showing that not only are attitudes and willingness-to-pay among international visitors to South Africa sufficient to replace the revenue from trophy hunting, but that attitudes to wildlife and willingness to accept novel income sources among the local populations are sufficient to permit such revenue to enact animal welfare and species conservation goals in areas adjacent to lion habitats.' This work poses a serious problem for Van Der Merwe and Saayman. The communities they claim are helped by trophy hunting clearly do not want it. Not comparing apples with apples The reason that Van Der Merwe and Saayman have come up with such a large 'economic impact' figure is because they combined the effects of domestic 'biltong' hunting and international 'trophy hunting' in their multiplier analysis (more on this dubious methodology later), which has not been done previously. It would have been helpful to separate these two out, especially given that it is difficult to ascertain the number of 'biltong' hunters, a problem the authors readily admit to: 'Although care was taken to reach both segments of the hunting tourism industry, the estimate of the number of biltong hunters in South Africa remains only that.' On expenditure alone, much of which does not accrue directly to South Africa (plane tickets bought elsewhere, etc), the authors calculate that trophy hunting is worth $169.6-million (presumably per year), while biltong hunting is worth $718.7-million. As Steph Klarmann showed earlier this year, though, statistics obtained via the Promotion of Access to Information Act put the figure at $83-million (R1.47-billion) for trophy hunting in 2023 (which cost 34,515 animals their lives). This is nearly half the number reported by Van Der Merwe and Saayman. The last academic estimate on the economic significance (not just direct expenditure) of international trophy hunting to South Africa was made in 2018 by the same North-West authors. That paper is methodologically flawed to the same degree as the 2025 iteration, as I have explained at length in other work. The 2018 paper boldly claimed that – including the multiplier effect – trophy hunting was worth $341-million to the South African economy (presumably in any given season). Without the multiplier effect, the authors estimate expenditure was worth about $250-million. Journalists like Stoddard should therefore be more careful when stating that the 2025 work reflects a 'significantly larger sum' than previous estimates. On trophy hunting alone, this is clearly untrue. Simply combining the two figures (biltong and trophy) and attaching a multiplier effect to them is dubious economics and not comparing apples with apples. The 2025 Van der Merwe paper begins with a bit of history in the literature review about private wildlife ownership in South Africa and repeats a 2005 figure that about 20 million hectares of wild landscape is currently under private ownership in South Africa through roughly 9,000 'game' farms. By contrast, state land under conservation is eight million hectares, of which the Kruger National Park accounts for at least a quarter. Erroneous assumptions An underlying assumption that permeates much of the literature that Van Der Merwe and Saayman cite, and that they themselves seem to uncritically accept, is that this private wild land would automatically convert to nature-destructive agriculture if hunting were removed as a revenue option. This is an untested assumption, useful as a rhetorical device to rationalise hunting but useless as a means of ascertaining truth. Moreover, these 9,000 farms are often internally fragmented and not joined up (except in the case of the Associated Private Nature Reserves on the western boundary of the Kruger Park, where the community surveys were run to show opposition to trophy hunting). They are, therefore, hardly an unmitigated good, and many have a poor record of managing elephants and lions. None of this is recognised by the authors. Flawed methodology The most concerning thing about the Van Der Merwe paper is the methodology: Self-reporting by hunters: First, the results are drawn from a 'web-based, self-administered questionnaire' distributed by the Sustainable Use Coalition. This is a coalition of about 150,000 people committed to the idea that placing an extractive value on an animal is the only thing that should determine whether that animal is worth keeping or not. In other words, 'if it pays, it stays'. A corollary problem is that those who complete the survey have a vested interest in the outcome – in other words, those who hunt have an interest in overstating their self-reported expenditure to maintain pro-hunting policies; Insufficient sample size: The sample size is extremely small. Only 414 hunters responded to the survey out of a possible 6,242 international hunters who came to South Africa between August 2022 and October 2023 (the period under consideration after Covid). That's a paltry 6.6% of the total. The authors write that 'the international questionnaire asked respondents to recall their spending during their last hunting safari to South Africa'. They did this on the assumption that most international hunters only visit South Africa once a year. Of course, what they're asking for is self-reported thumb-sucking. There is literally no verification of the data or any attempt to ascertain whether what is reported is true; Wrong assumption that all hunters spend equally: After discounting for the fact that a portion of the expenditure does not accrue to South Africa, the authors estimated that each hunter in their sample spent an average of $27,170. They then simply multiplied that amount by 6,242, as if their 6.6% sample was somehow representative of the entire population. This is how they get the figure of $169.6-million; and Dubious multiplier: The authors use the latest Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) to calculate a 'multiplier effect' of hunters' expenditure. This is a table that estimates the induced and indirect impact on the economy of every dollar spent. Using an overall production multiplier of 2.97 across all sectors affected by hunting expenditure, they calculate that total spending of $856.6-million (trophy and biltong combined) equates to economic significance of $2.543-billion. My problem with this kind of hit job is that it suffers from weak economics, which any peer reviewer should have picked up. The SAM is deficient when applied to ecologically and ethically contentious activities like trophy hunting because it depends on a mechanistic conception of the economy as a closed circular flow of income and fails to account for the real biophysical opportunity costs of depleting irreplaceable nature (especially of ecosystem engineers like elephants). It further treats all monetary transactions as equally virtuous, thereby granting the same economic 'weight' to a trophy fee for killing a lion as to expenditures on education or ecosystem restoration. This reductionist metric ignores the sacrificed regenerative and intrinsic value of biodiversity. Opportunity cost assumptions The authors argue that $2.5-billion is the 'loss to the economy should this activity totally cease to exist'. But that is sheer unwarranted speculation, along with the concluding claim that 'reduction in hunting tourism activities will negatively impact land use for wildlife as landowners will revert back to alternative agricultural activities such as domesticated livestock or crop farming to generate revenue, which will not benefit wildlife and conservation'. The authors have done no economics work to demonstrate this at all. All they have done is make a dubious claim that hunting is worth $2.5-billion to the South African economy. That does not give anyone licence to claim that removing hunting would render that land suddenly devoid of any biodiversity. The bottom line is that the very communities that hunters say they benefit are the same communities telling us they don't want it, and the figures to rationalise this extractive activity are clearly overblown. DM Dr Ross Harvey is Director of Harvey Economics Pty Ltd.
Daily Maverick
a day ago
- Daily Maverick
eThekwini's energy deal is not the green win it seems to be
The Durban metro's landmark 400MW power deal is not a renewable energy success. It's a carefully orchestrated national strategy to avert an industrial catastrophe that could wipe out 5% of GDP. Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramokgopa needed only four succinct bullet points in the Government Gazette to herald a landmark 400MW energy deal: eThekwini will be South Africa's first metro to procure substantial power from independent producers and could potentially reduce its reliance on Eskom by 18%. But the devil is in the detail, which reveals that this isn't quite the green energy story many may have been expecting. Of the 400MW capacity, only 100MW will come from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. The remaining 300MW will be generated by natural gas. This makes eThekwini's deal less a renewable energy triumph than a strategic manoeuvre to avert the other national energy crisis: the 'gas cliff'. South Africa faces the imminent collapse of its natural gas supply. This could devastate industries worth up to R700-billion annually and directly threaten more than 70,000 jobs. The country's industrial economy depends heavily on gas imports from Mozambique via the Rompco pipeline. But those Pande and Temane fields are rapidly depleting and Sasol, the primary importer, has notified customers that it will cease supplying the commercial market between 2026 and 2028. Ramokgopa has called the gas cliff the 'second most pressing issue' keeping him up at night after load shedding, with the potential 'to wipe out 5% of the country's GDP'. This helps to make sense of eThekwini's gas-heavy procurement. It didn't stumble into a gas deal; it is a deliberate move. The municipality's initial public statements spoke of '400MW of renewable energy', but the request for information (RFI) issued in July 2021 was, strategically, 'technology-agnostic'. When the RFI closed 90 days later, it had generated overwhelming support from 104 potential projects totalling 16,477MW. A breakdown of the technology was revealing. Of the 8,857MW of individual generation assets proposed, natural gas was the single-largest category at 40%, followed by solar PV at just 23%. The message was clear: private developers see gas as the 'most mature, large-scale and readily available' option for dispatchable power that can be switched on when needed. This market-driven evolution towards gas wasn't coincidental. It reflected the technical reality that intermittent renewable sources need backup. The timelines of the procurement and the national gas infrastructure response reveal a carefully coordinated strategy: 2021: eThekwini launches its procurement proces. 2023: Sasol officially announces cessation of gas supply between 2026 and 2028. February 2025: The Zululand Energy Terminal consortium signs a 25-year agreement to develop a liquefied natural gas (LNG) import facility at Richards Bay. August: eThekwini receives final approval for its 400MW deal. 2026: The projected gas cliff begins, eThekwini plans to issue its gas tender, and the LNG terminal aims for a final investment decision. 2028: Both the eThekwini gas plant and the LNG terminal target commercial operation. This isn't a coincidence. eThekwini will serve as a foundational anchor customer for the Zululand Energy Terminal, a joint venture between Dutch multinational Royal Vopak and Transnet Pipelines. The gas will flow through the repurposed Lilly pipeline, avoiding the need for expensive new infrastructure. This creates a symbiosis whereby the power plant depends on the LNG terminal's completion, while the terminal needs the long-term power purchase agreement to justify its investment. Tracking dirt into the energy transition The eThekwini deal sits uncomfortably with the energy transition narrative. Dr Karen Surridge, renewable energy project manager at the South African National Energy Development Institute, recently celebrated how electricity constraints had driven 'a boom in the solar PV and battery industries', with marked improvements in efficiency and cost reduction. But eThekwini's procurement tells a different story. Despite the rhetoric about innovation and renewable energy, when a municipality needed large-scale, reliable power quickly, the market delivered gas. This reflects a broader tension in South Africa's energy transition. Whereas policy documents speak of renewable energy and the just energy transition, practical decisions increasingly favour gas as a 'critical transitional fuel'. The draft Integrated Resource Plan 2023 allocates significant new generation capacity to gas-fired plants, up to 22,000MW of combined cycle gas turbines by 2050. Importantly, no companies have been awarded contracts yet. The formal bidding process through requests for proposals is still to come – solar PV tenders in December this year, and gas-to-power tenders in 2026. But the initial interest was overwhelming: 104 potential projects, including 96 energy-generation proposals and eight financial institutions. The delay until 2026 for gas tenders is strategic, aligning with when the Zululand Energy Terminal consortium needs customer commitments to reach its 'final investment decision'. It's also when the country will be teetering on that gas cliff. Environmental justice organisations aren't buying the transition fuel argument. They see new gas infrastructure as creating stranded assets in an accelerating global energy transition, and question whether gas can truly be considered clean. But industrial stakeholders view projects such as eThekwini's as vital lifelines. The municipality projects savings of R5-billion over the duration of the power purchase agreement, and R8.5-billion in private investment creating an estimated 2,200 jobs. The project faces significant risks: global LNG price volatility, construction delays that could leave industries exposed to the gas cliff, and the real possibility that environmental challenges could derail the creation of critical infrastructure. Viewing things at utility scale eThekwini's 400MW deal is more than a case of municipal power procurement. It's a test case for South Africa's ability to navigate the immense trade-offs inherent in its path towards a just and sustainable energy future. The deal reveals the gap between renewable energy rhetoric and practical implementation. Innovation advocates may celebrate solar and battery breakthroughs, but critical infrastructure decisions still favour gas for its reliability and scale. It also highlights the coordinated national response to the gas cliff – a crisis that could prove more immediately devastating than blackouts, even though it has received far less public attention. As South Africa grapples with its energy future, eThekwini's renewable energy deal offers a sobering lesson: in the complex world of energy security, good intentions often collide with harsh realities. The municipality set out to buy renewable energy and ended up as a linchpin in a national strategy to avert industrial catastrophe. Whether that's pragmatic policymaking or a failure of renewable energy ambition may depend on one's perspective. What's certain is that the eThekwini deal will be closely watched as other municipalities consider their own energy independence – and as South Africa races against time to prevent its industries from falling off the gas cliff. DM
