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Joburg’s Adjustment Budget Sinks

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Joburg’s Adjustment Budget Sinks:

WaterCAN and JoburgCAN are concerned about the very small water budget increase, the plan for massive debt funding and the chaotic failure to process the adjusted budget.

Today the City of Joburg council tabled an adjustment budget with a little more spending for water infrastructure, following our petition demanding a major budget rewrite, but then failed to process it when the meeting collapsed due to political infighting.

While the City tabled the adjustment budget documents, WaterCAN and JoburgCAN and partners protested outside the council building in Braamfontein, to remind the council of our calls for increased spending on water infrastructure. Our petition called for the ringfencing of water and sanitation revenue for Joburg Water, and for a doubling of capital spending.

The City’s tabled adjustment budget plans a small increase for the City’s overall capital budget for 2024/25 of R318 million, with R200 million of this to be funded by new debt, taking the capital budget to R7.733 billion. This is for the full City capital spending budget. Within that, the Joburg Water capital budget will increase by just R70 million, to R1.291 billion. It also projects additional capital spending for the next two years, without details.

The City’s operating budget is due to increase by R2.570 billion, which increases it from R86.652 billion to R89.223 billion.

The funding plan for this adjustment is alarming and underlines the City’s financial crisis: the City plans to take on additional debt of R8.2 billion during 2024/25 to 2026/27. This is not sustainable.

On the water and sanitation side, we are deeply concerned that the City’s adjustment funds water projects by taking money away from some sanitation projects. This is unacceptable.

In particular, we note with shock that the City cuts R30 million from the Bushkoppies waste water treatment works (WWTW) renewal project and R1.5 million from the Goudkoppies WWTW renewal project. The pollution from both these WWTWs is so severe that in July 2023 WaterCAN laid criminal charges against the City in connection with both of these (see here).

On electricity, there was no adjustment to the prepaid electricity surcharge of R230 a month, despite the City having undertaken to review this. We object to this.

We call on the City to go through the budget, line by line, and cut wasteful, unnecessary and non-core spending. This is no longer optional, it is essential for the City’s survival.

The adjustment operational budget illustrates some of the chaos. For example, the closure of the metro building resulted in loss of revenue of R500 000 because they could not sell copies of building plans, and of R1.2 million in revenue on sales of geo information services, while in the Municipal Entities Accounts “sale of goods and rendering of services [were] reduced by R300 million due to delays in by-laws approvals by Development Planning and EAC [executive adjudication committee] approvals of new contracts”.

WaterCAN and JoburgCAN noted previously (see here) that, in the 2024/25 main budget, the City Manager’s office costs R1.9 billion a year in operational costs (more than Health at R1.5 billion), Group Finance costs R6 billion (more than Public Safety), Group Information and Communication Technology costs R1 billion, and “Municipal Entities Accounts” costs R2 billion (this is in addition to separate budgets for City Power, Joburg Water, Pikitup, Joburg Roads Agency and nine other entities). We believe there are opportunities for reprioritisation.

Today’s council meeting ended without voting on the adjusted budget, due to political infighting and disruption by the ANC coalition. This means the City will miss the legal end-of-month deadline for passing the adjustment budget, as there must be three days’ notice for another council meeting. This will require the City to apply for National Treasury permission to pass a late adjustment budget or revert to the existing now unfunded main budget.

This is an indication of the financial and administrative chaos in the City.

– MyZA

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Top Star Drive-In: Destroyed by What Created it

However, the very thing that created the Top Star eventually destroyed it. Because the early miners had used crude methods, the Ferreira Dump—and dozens of others like it—still contained significant traces of gold. As the price of gold rose and new chemical extraction technologies (like the carbon-in-pulp process) made it profitable to “mine the waste,” the ground beneath the Top Star became more valuable than the cinema itself. In 2006, despite fierce opposition from heritage groups who argued that the dump and the drive-in were culturally significant landmarks, the projectors were turned off for the last time.

The reclamation of the dump was a staggering industrial feat. Starting in 2008, mining giant DRDGold used high-pressure water cannons to “monitor” the dump, turning 5 million tons of solid earth back into a liquid slurry. This slurry was then piped 40 kilometers across the province to a processing plant in Brakpan. By 2011, the “mountain” had completely vanished. The 50-meter-high plateau that had dominated the southern skyline for a century was reduced to a flat, dusty crater.

The disappearance of the Top Star is a poignant symbol of Johannesburg’s “extractive” nature. It is a city that consumes itself to stay alive; even its historical landmarks are subject to the fluctuating price of minerals on the London and New York stock exchanges. Today, if you drive along the M2, there is an empty space in the sky where the Top Star used to be. While the reclamation removed a source of toxic dust and “acid mine drainage,” it also erased a piece of the city’s collective memory. The land where the gold-flecked mountain once stood is now being rehabilitated for light industrial use, proving that in eGoli, even the horizon is for sale if there’s enough gold hidden inside it.