Given Majola|Published
Property owners say unreliable municipal services are forcing them to spend millions on generators and emergency water tankers, putting Johannesburg’s inner-city renewal at risk.
Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration faces growing pressure as failures in local electricity and water distribution networks push emergency operating costs onto private property owners.
Data from the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association (JPOMA) indicates that some landlords have spent up to R2.5 million on generator diesel over about two weeks. Other property owners have paid R10 000 every two days for emergency water tankers.
These figures are reported member estimates and do not represent the total cost across the inner city.
Power interruptions can also affect water supplies in high-density buildings. When booster pumps stop working, water may not reach upper floors, leaving residents without drinking water or basic sanitation.
According to JPOMA, more than 6 000 residential units were affected in examples supplied by its members. The association said these examples should not be treated as a count of the entire affected area.
Property owners say the disruptions are contributing to rising operating costs and may discourage further refurbishment and investment. A claim that vacancies increased from 3% to 20% in 60 days requires further verification and should not be presented as a citywide trend without supporting data.
South Africa continues to attract private investment, but unreliable electricity and water services are forcing businesses and property owners to absorb costs that erode returns and threaten future growth.
Gerhard Kotze, CEO and franchisor at RealNet Properties, said the immediate concern for many Johannesburg property owners was not national electricity supply alone, but the capacity and reliability of municipal distribution networks.
“When local distribution networks fail, the cost of keeping basic utilities running gets dumped straight onto private balance sheets,” Kotze said.
The consequences extend beyond the cost of fuel and maintenance.
“In high-density residential buildings, an electricity outage immediately becomes a water crisis. Municipal water pressure is rarely strong enough to reach upper floors without electric booster pumps. When the power cuts out, residents are left without drinking water or basic sanitation, turning a utility interruption into an immediate health and safety hazard.”
Kotze said reliable electricity and water supply to the property boundary was the minimum requirement if cities wanted investors to continue buying, renovating and maintaining inner-city buildings.
The National has previously examined how Johannesburg’s infrastructure crisis is becoming a business cost and how budget mismatches hamper service delivery.
The infrastructure challenges come despite positive investment sentiment.
At the 2026 KwaZulu-Natal Investment Conference, investors pledged R124.5 billion, exceeding the province’s target of R95 billion, according to the provincial government.
The government said the commitments were expected to lead to more than 330,000 jobs. However, these are projected jobs linked to investment pledges and should not be treated as guaranteed employment.
The figures highlight the difference between attracting investment and ensuring that projects are completed, businesses operate successfully and employment follows.
Miyelani Holeni, group chief adviser at management consultancy Ntiyiso, said municipalities needed to become credible partners to attract private investment.
Holeni called for infrastructure revenues from water, electricity and waste tariffs to be reinvested in the systems they support, rather than diverted to other spending.
He also argued that government should do more to facilitate investment by improving approval processes, developing credible public-private partnership frameworks and using blended-finance instruments such as the Infrastructure Fund and Credit Guarantee Vehicle to reduce risk for pension funds, banks and insurers.
Ross Levin, licensee and owner at Seeff Atlantic Seaboard City Bowl, has argued that job creation needs to remain central to the national economic debate, alongside attention to municipal performance and the cost of living.
“With local elections coming up, our focus has been on service delivery and municipalities. All of that matters. But it has distracted us from something we should be holding the national government accountable for: job creation. Behind every one of these statistics is a person, a family and, increasingly, a generation losing hope. We cannot become numb to the numbers or the situation. And we should measure progress not only by inflation and interest rates, but by how many South Africans are finding work,” Levin said.
Lesley Mashiri, co-founder of Urban Gurus, recently said that private capital was essential to developing new industries, infrastructure, technology and employment.
Attracting investment, Mashiri said, was only part of the challenge: it also had to be connected to people, firms and places.
That required coordination across transport, housing, skills, infrastructure, land management and supplier development — areas often handled by separate institutions that did not plan around the same projects.
Mashiri said the debate over whether investment was good or bad had limited value without a more practical question: “Under what institutional, spatial and economic conditions does private investment translate into broad-based local prosperity?”
In a recent article, City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the utility recorded 76 329 low-voltage incidents and 3 221 medium-voltage incidents between January 1 and October 6.
The network-reported average restoration time was 105.1 hours for low-voltage incidents and 37.1 hours for medium- and high-voltage incidents combined.