The City of Johannesburg’s Integrated Development Plan process is failing at almost every level and needs an urgent overhaul if the city is ever to turn around in a coordinated manner, says the Johannesburg Community Action Network (JoburgCAN).
JoburgCAN’s deep-dive retrospective review of every IDP produced between 2022 and 2026, titled A City of Broken Promises, found that residents are being asked to comment on new plans without being given a clear, consistent and accessible account of whether previous commitments were met. It also found that there appear to be few, if any, key performance indicators tracking the capital projects outlined in each IDP.
Read the IDP Retrospective Report here.
“The IDP is supposed to be the city’s five-year service delivery and development contract with residents beginning immediately after a local government election. Instead, Johannesburg’s IDP process has become a moving target,” said JoburgCAN managing director Julia Fish.
Read JoburgCAN’s comment on the 2026-2027 IDP here.
“Targets shift, indicators disappear, baselines are reset, and sometimes information is copied and pasted across documents. Residents are left trying to measure delivery through documents that do not tell a clear story. Additionally, even for concerned citizens who are able to work through the difficult-to-understand reports, obtaining them from the city or its website, as required by law, is incredibly difficult. We had to hire a researcher to help us. This is not public participation.”
JoburgCAN said the draft 2026/27 IDP sets new targets and uses a new 2024/25 baseline, but does not clearly report against the five-year targets set in the 2022 IDP, when the municipal government came into office. This makes it difficult to assess whether the current administration has delivered on the commitments made at the start of its term.
Read the IDP Retrospective Report here.
For instance, between 2022 and 2026, financial sustainability moved from priority two to priority one; sustainable service delivery moved from priority four to priority three; energy mix was not on the initial list but is now priority three; and infrastructure development dropped from fifth to sixth priority.
Read JoburgCAN’s comment on the 2026-2027 IDP here.
Fish said the situation was made even more complex by multiple leadership changes over the five-year period, which resulted in priorities changing within 12-month periods and deepened the disconnect between what the city says it is prioritising and the reality residents experience.
The draft IDP acknowledges severe water-system stress, high water-main failure rates, high non-revenue water and a Johannesburg Water renewal backlog of R26.61 billion. It also records a consolidated infrastructure renewal and maintenance backlog exceeding R220 billion, including R115 billion for the Johannesburg Roads Agency, R44.25 billion for City Power and R26.61 billion for Johannesburg Water.
“These numbers should be treated as a full-blown infrastructure emergency,” said Fish. “Yet the IDP still does not present a coherent, funded and traceable recovery plan for residents who live with water outages, electricity failures, collapsing roads and emergency responses that have become permanent.”
Fish said that while identifying and reporting on the headline numbers across the various city agencies was positive, the municipality had also wilfully ignored the crisis while clearly monitoring the rising backlog costs.
“The city is now facing a triple infrastructure crisis: the expense of renewing collapsing infrastructure that has not been maintained; the cost of building new infrastructure to extend services to a growing unserved population; and the cost of replacing existing infrastructure that is at, or heading towards, the end of its useful life. We all know this, but the latest iteration of the IDP for the 2026/27 period does not address this clearly,” said Fish.
JoburgCAN said the use of mobile water tankers is one of the clearest examples of this failure. Despite widespread water outages and the routine use of tankers, the draft 2026/27 IDP does not provide meaningful KPIs to track tanker use, costs, affected areas, frequency of deployment or targets to reduce reliance on tankers.
“If tankers are now part of the city’s water system, then the city must say so, budget for them transparently and measure them openly. If they are an emergency measure, then the city must show residents how and when this dependency will end,” said Fish.
JoburgCAN’s own scorecard, compiled from the city’s IDP figures, found serious warning signs, including:
- Revenue collection had dropped to 86% by 2024/25.
- Cash coverage halved over five years from 30 days to 15 days.
- Spending on repairs and maintenance did not meet the National Treasury benchmark of 8% of property, plant and equipment value over the five-year period reviewed.
- Rea Vaya passenger trips appear to have dropped from 35,921 in 2022/23 to 19,972 in 2024/25, without a clear turnaround plan.
- Road resurfacing dropped from 237 lane kilometres in 2020/21 to 112 lane kilometres in 2024/25.
- Stormwater drain upgrades were less than 1km in 2024/25.
Fish said the next government elected to run the city after the November 2026 election, has an opportunity to completely revisit the IDP and set the tone for the next five years, from 2026 to 2031.
This should include a retrospective on what was promised, what was delivered, what failed, why it failed, who is responsible and what funded corrective plan follows.
“Residents cannot keep being asked to participate in a process where the goalposts move every year,” said Fish. “The city must stop hiding failure behind shifting indicators and start giving residents the transparent, measurable and funded plan they deserve.”