'We're Done Waiting': Joburg Residents Speak Out as Power and Governance Fractures Widen

Three years after load shedding peaked at Stage 6, Johannesburg residents are confronting a different kind of darkness — one rooted not in failing turbines but in failing politics. The city's governing coalition, stitched together from the ANC and the DA following the 2024 municipal elections, is showing deep fractures over budget priorities, infrastructure spending, and who, exactly, is accountable when the lights still flicker in Orlando East at 11 p.m. on a Thursday.

The cracks matter now because the Johannesburg Metro's Integrated Development Plan review, due for public comment by 31 July 2026, will lock in infrastructure spending for the next three financial years. Community groups say the process has been hijacked by political point-scoring between coalition partners, leaving residents — particularly in Soweto, Diepsloot, and the inner-city Hillbrow corridor — without meaningful input into decisions that will shape their neighbourhoods through 2029.

Voices From the Neighbourhoods

At the Bara Taxi Rank in Soweto, conversations turn quickly to electricity costs and erratic supply. Residents describe their monthly prepaid electricity bills climbing past R1,200 for modest households since City Power's April 2026 tariff adjustment pushed residential rates up by 12.7 percent. That increase, approved by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa, hit low-income consumers on the Lifeline tariff particularly hard, because the free basic electricity allocation — unchanged at 50 kilowatt-hours per month since 2021 — covers barely a week of cooking and lighting for a family of five.

In Hillbrow, residents near the intersection of Pretoria Street and Twist Street say they have attended two community liaison meetings hosted by the Johannesburg Development Agency in 2026, only to find coalition councillors absent and junior officials unable to answer questions about the R4.3 billion water and sanitation backlog figure cited in the city's own mid-year report tabled in March. "They send someone who can't sign anything," one community activist from the Hillbrow Residents' Association told this reporter. "What's the point?"

Further north, in Randburg's Bloubosrand, ratepayers' associations are more organised but equally frustrated. The Greater Randburg Ratepayers Association has formally objected to what they call a "governance vacuum" — their term — created when the ANC and DA failed to agree on a new city manager appointment for four months, leaving the position acting from February through to late May 2026. Infrastructure project approvals stalled during that period, including a R78 million road resurfacing tender for Judges Avenue and surrounds that had been in procurement since August 2025.

The Coalition Math and What It Costs Communities

The political arithmetic is straightforward enough. The ANC holds 91 seats in the Johannesburg City Council against the DA's 88, with smaller parties including the EFF, ActionSA, and the Patriotic Alliance providing the margins that keep the arrangement alive. Each budget vote becomes a negotiation, and community leaders say service delivery is the last item on the agenda rather than the first.

The South African Cities Network, in its State of Cities report published in May 2026, noted that Johannesburg's capital expenditure on electricity distribution infrastructure dropped to 61 percent of budget in the 2024/25 financial year, down from 78 percent two years earlier. City Power attributed the underspend partly to contractor disputes and partly to delayed approvals — a bureaucratic fog that residents in load shedding-prone areas like Eldorado Park and parts of Ennerdale say they experience as a physical reality every week.

Community members are not waiting for the coalition to resolve its internal disputes. Several civic groups, including the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, plan to submit formal objections to the IDP review before the 31 July deadline. Residents in Hillbrow have been encouraged by ward councillors aligned with neither major party to attend a public participation meeting at the Johannesburg Civic Centre on Loveday Street, scheduled for 22 July. For those unable to attend in person, the city's e-services portal — which has itself been intermittently offline — is the official submission channel. The next Johannesburg Metro council sitting is set for 30 July, and the budget vote that follows will test whether the coalition can govern at all, or whether residents will spend another winter navigating a city that talks loudly and delivers quietly.