The city of Johannesburg is no more
Image: Simon Majadibodu/IOL
On Thursday 31 July I asked the driver of the car we were using to take us around the Johannesburg CBD to see the state of the city. Having lived just across the city, in Braamfontein, from January 1983 to December 1984 and having enjoyed many walks into the CBD and its surroundings, nothing could have prepared me for the shock. The Johannesburg CBD is no more. It's been destroyed.
I asked our driver to drive through the CBD's famous streets, such as Commissioner, Eloff, Bree, Rissik, Jeppe, and others. Every street we drove through confronted me with a dystopian nightmare – except in this case, it was all real. The CBD was a heaving, suffering, mortally wounded animal, breathing its last as violent humans further violated what remained of its beauty. The Johannesburg CBD is a parking lot for taxis.
They park anywhere and everywhere. The few police officers we saw were accompanied by security guards. Hotels and businesses have all closed or relocated. It seemed that the buildings had last been maintained in 1983. The old Stock Exchange Building with its mirrored exterior, where we once took pictures in 1984, is now just a piece of filthy glass. The road infrastructure is collapsing.
I fear to think what's happening to the underground sewerage systems in the CBD. The garbage is piling up on every corner. Public toilets are any open spot, wherever you can find one, for men and women. I saw knocked-down, rusting traffic lights with weeds growing in-between them, evidence of how long they have been lying there. A red traffic light is merely a suggestion to slow down, not to stop. A Sunday newspaper headlined the same story. A city is collapsing because its leadership is incompetent and corrupt. When President Ramaphosa, in March 2025, expressed his shock at the state of the Johannesburg CBD, one felt the betrayal like a bitter poison in the mouth. How could he not have known?
He subsequently established the Presidential Johannesburg Working Group, alongside mayor Dada Morero, to address the city's issues ahead of the G20 summit. Like many of the president's projects, this one appears also to be money-rich but stillborn. While budgets are being spent, my tour of the Johannesburg CBD revealed little evidence that anything has changed between 6 March and 31 July 2025. According to the Sunday Times, Finance Minister Godongwana is also on the warpath with mayor Morero, highlighting 'R1.4bn in unauthorised expenditure, R22bn in irregular expenditure, and R705m in fruitless and wasteful expenditure.' If there is ever a picture of the heart of the ANC, it is the state of the Johannesburg CBD.
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. Lorenzo Davids is the Executive Director of Urban Issues Consulting.
Image: Supplied
Once the centre of our celebration of freedom and justice, it now feeds itself and its families off every cent allocated to help the people of that city. What is so deeply disturbing is that the ANC leaders are not disturbed by this. They still believe they can fix Johannesburg. Premier Lesufi and Mayor Morero are optimistic about returning the city to its glory days. Many, however, see only more money being spent that will go into the pockets of the corrupt, while the city continues to recede further into total collapse.
If you wish to see the clearest example of the careless and cancerous rot within political governance, look no further than what is happening to the Johannesburg CBD. The place that contributes the most to our national GDP, where the students of 1976 showed the way to freedom, where Mandela and Tambo had offices, where the Freedom Charter was adopted, where Ahmed Timol died and where the Treason Trialists faced the Apartheid government in an epic trial, is facing a tragic demise. Sandton and Centurion are the alternative places to do business in Johannesburg. At the same time, our freedom's history in the Johannesburg CBD is being destroyed by those who had a duty to protect it.
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