There is something strange about the 2026 local elections.

South Africans will be voting for councils across the country, but an extraordinary amount of political attention has settled on one city: Johannesburg.

There are good reasons for that. Johannesburg is the economic heart of the country. Reuters puts the city’s contribution at about 15% of South Africa’s GDP. It is also a city that has spent much of the past five years providing a fairly convincing demonstration of what happens when political instability meets institutional decline.

Since the 2021 local government elections, the mayoral chain has moved repeatedly between the DA, ANC and Al Jama-ah. Johannesburg has had Mpho Phalatse, Dada Morero, Phalatse again, Thapelo Amad, Kabelo Gwamanda and then Morero again.

All the while, the deterioration of the city has become increasingly difficult to ignore.

You don’t need an auditor’s report to tell you something has gone wrong in Johannesburg. You can see it.

You see it in the traffic lights that don’t work, the roads that deteriorate, the water outages, the rubbish, the neglected public spaces and the increasingly strange phenomenon of private companies and residents’ associations stepping in to perform functions we once assumed belonged to the city.

This election therefore raises a question bigger than who gets to wear the mayoral chain.

Can Johannesburg actually be fixed?

That was the question sitting in the back of my mind when I sat down with Rise Mzansi’s Johannesburg mayoral candidate, Lukhona Mnguni.

I have known Lukhona for years. I knew him as an academic, political analyst, public intellectual and activist. I knew him as someone who analysed politicians rather than someone who wanted to become one.

So I was curious. Why would a young, educated person with a perfectly viable life outside politics willingly walk into South African party politics, and particularly into the mess that is Johannesburg?

His answer was surprisingly simple. Johannesburg is home.

His son was born here. He works here. He owns property here. And, as he put it to me, if the city stops working, eventually there is a choice to make: fix it or leave.

But Lukhona’s diagnosis of Johannesburg is considerably more dramatic.

“Joburg is broke and broken,” he told me.

Broke refers to the finances.

His evidence for the decline isn’t particularly complicated either.

“When cities collapse, it becomes visible in the infrastructure, in the filth, in the dilapidated buildings, abundant properties and so on.”

He points to homelessness, unemployment and visible social distress as part of the same picture.

His conclusion is stark: “Joburg is at the brink of collapse.”

Lukhona isn’t really making the usual municipal election argument that electing the right mayor will magically make the potholes disappear.

His argument is about state capacity. Lukhona put the underlying principle to me in one sentence:

“You cannot have quality life without a capable city.”

That, to me, is the more interesting argument of this election.

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We talk constantly about service delivery, but much less about the machinery required to deliver the service.

A functioning municipality is actually quite boring and as a Joburg resident I don’t mind boring.

There was another part of our conversation that stayed with me.

Drive through parts of Johannesburg and you can watch an informal privatisation of municipal government taking place in real time.

Lukhona worries that Johannesburg could increasingly become a collection of functioning enclaves surrounded by decline.

And he makes an important point about decay: it moves.

“The thing is, our decay is like cancer, it’s spreads.”

Lukhona is running for Rise Mzansi, a relatively new party trying to establish itself in an extraordinarily crowded Johannesburg contest. The IEC’s final candidate certification puts 75 parties on the city’s PR ballot.

The latest Ipsos research describes Johannesburg as one of the metros where the ANC and DA remain the leading parties, with ActionSA’s strongest support also concentrated in Gauteng. Importantly, Ipsos cautions that there are still substantial numbers of persuadable voters and that the contest remains unsettled.

Whether Rise Mzansi governs Johannesburg or not, Lukhona says he intends to serve in council (unlike Helen Zille, he says.)

The real test for whoever governs Johannesburg after this election won’t be whether they have the best slogan.

It will be whether the city can rebuild the dull machinery of government: finances, administration, infrastructure, accountability and long-term planning.

Lukhona describes the city as a “microcosm” whose failure could become a much larger South African problem.

Watch my full conversation with Lukhona Mnguni on The Debrief with Qaanitah Hunter. Once you’ve watched it, double-check that you’re subscribed to The Debrief Network and tell me what you think.

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