If you call Johannesburg home, as I do, you have probably had the thought: maybe this city is just too far gone.
I have. Drive around at night and entire stretches of the city are dark. Traffic lights don’t work. Potholes become permanent landmarks. Grass grows over pavements. Water pipes burst, are repaired and burst again.
Living in Johannesburg sometimes feels like an extreme sport.
And after enough of this, dysfunction starts to feel permanent. And it’s not Joburg alone.
So when I decided to make an episode of Let’s Debrief about whether Johannesburg/ South African can actually be turned around, I called my friend, journalist and author Nickolaus Bauer.
I accused Nick of being a toxic optimist. I am not. Actually, I am a little (a lot) jaded.
Which is how I ended up standing at the top of Ponte Tower in Hillbrow, looking out over Johannesburg and being forced to reconsider some of my assumptions about the city.
Because Ponte presents an inconvenient problem for pessimists like me. It has already been turned around.
Opened in 1975, Ponte was once the ultimate symbol of aspirational inner-city living. Then Johannesburg changed, the inner city declined and Ponte declined with it.
By the 1990s and early 2000s, it had become infamous.
There was no running water or reliable electricity. Rubbish accumulated inside the hollow core of the building, reportedly rising several storeys high. Ponte became shorthand for everything people believed had gone wrong with Johannesburg.
It was, in other words, written off. And yet today Ponte is a functioning residential building again.
People live there. Children play there. Social enterprises operate there. The building that once symbolised Johannesburg’s collapse has somehow become evidence that collapse does not have to be permanent.
That matters. Because we tend to talk about Johannesburg as though it is one enormous problem. It isn’t.
Johannesburg (the same is true for Durban or Bloemfontein) is thousands of smaller problems happening at the same time.
A broken traffic light here. An uncut park there. A leaking pipe. An abandoned building. A library that closes early. A pothole nobody fixes.
Put enough of those failures together and eventually you get something that feels like a failed city.
But the reverse must also be true. Fix enough small things and eventually you start rebuilding a city.
The Johannesburg paradox
Standing inside Nick’s old apartment in Ponte, we looked out over one of the strangest views of Johannesburg.
On one side, the city was covered in purple. It is jacaranda season, and from that height you can see these extraordinary streaks of purple running towards Rosebank and Sandton.
Then, almost directly beneath this beautiful scene, there were burning tyres on a bridge between Berea and Yeoville.
And I thought: of course. This is Johannesburg. Jacarandas and burning tyres.
Beauty and dysfunction existing almost on top of each other.
But Nick reminded me of something else about this city. Johannesburg remains a place people come to.
People still arrive here looking for jobs, opportunity and a better life. Businesses are still built here. Young people still move here. Immigrants still arrive here.
For all its dysfunction, Johannesburg remains a hustler’s paradise.
Which brings us to the election. South Africans vote in the local government elections on 4 November.
And Nick has written South Africa’s Easy Election Guide: Local Government 2026, which tries to explain what exactly we are voting for.
This sounds ridiculously simple, but it matters. Because politicians love promising things they cannot actually deliver.
Remember; a ward councillor cannot solve South Africa’s unemployment crisis.
Your municipality cannot single-handedly solve gender-based violence.
And as Nick reminded us: a mayoral candidate cannot fix South Africa’s immigration policy.
Local government has much more boring responsibilities. Does clean water come out of your tap? Does electricity flow when you switch on the light? Is your rubbish collected? Are the traffic lights working? Are potholes repaired? Is the grass cut?
That is what this election is about.
And perhaps we should become much more ruthless about judging politicians on those boring things.
Also, Nick and I disagreed about something. He believes active communities generally get better government. Residents organise, pressure councillors, clean neighbourhoods and take ownership of their wards.
I agree, to a point. But there is something that bothers me about this argument.
Across Johannesburg, residents are increasingly doing the municipality’s work themselves. They are raising money to cut grass. Paying people to clean pavements. Fixing public spaces. Filling gaps left by government.
(You can read more from a piece I wrote for The Friday Paper)
It is inspiring and it is also slightly absurd. I keep reminding people that we already pay the government to do these things.
And there is an obvious inequality problem. Wealthy communities can raise money, hire private security, employ gardeners and effectively build a parallel municipality around themselves.
We know that poor communities cannot. But Nick’s larger point stayed with me: Cities are not abstract things. They are built and destroyed through thousands of tiny decisions.
And perhaps that is why Ponte matters. If you had stood inside that building at its worst and described what it would eventually become, somebody would probably have laughed at you.
The same thing happens when you suggest Johannesburg can be fixed. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe we have become so accustomed to decline that we have started confusing difficult with impossible.
On 4 November, we aren’t voting for somebody to save South Africa. We’re choosing people to make sure the rubbish gets collected, the water runs, the roads work and the grass gets cut.
It isn’t glamorous. But perhaps fixing Johannesburg starts with something much less dramatic than saving Johannesburg.
Maybe we just need to start fixing one thing at a time.
Watch the full episode of Let’s Debrief with Nickolaus Bauer on our YouTube channel.