Mapping the local government creeping crisis in Gauteng

Introduction

In academic, media and policy circles alike, local government is increasingly described as a sphere in crisis (Harrison et al., 2025; McKinley, 2026; Mkhize et al., 2026). This portrayal would come as no surprise for many residents of municipalities across the country, for whom crisis is a condition of everyday life. Many doubt whether water will come out of the tap, and if it does, whether it is safe to drink. They are unsure whether they will have electricity at night, and if they do, how they will pay for it given steeply rising tariffs. Some have watched the same pothole grow into a crater the width of their street. Others have seen their streetlights stripped and left to rust. Those with wealth can opt out of this uncertainty and retreat into self-serviced enclaves, while those with less (or without) must find creative – sometimes illegal – ways to get by.

Of course service delivery and local development challenges are not new. Scholars highlighted many of these problems on the cusp of transition (Todes and Watson, 1986). However, antecedent challenges have been amplified by an array of issues, including: hung councils and coalitions, the norm of the local electoral landscape since 2016 (Booysen et al., 2023; Makubalo et al., 2025); breakdowns in the dividing lines between party and state and between politics and administration (Pieterse, 2020); and deterioration in fiscal stability and proper financial management (Langa and Balkaran, 2026). The result is an acute sense of crisis that is felt across all sectors of society, where some now even argue that the promise of developmental local government has not been realised (Mkhize et al., 2026).

The prevalence of a sense of crisis means that, at the current moment, local government commands a level of attention it rarely received in the past. Much of this attention falls on the municipalities of Gauteng, the country’s most populous province and economic heartland – and above all on the City of Johannesburg. In March 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa established the Presidential Johannesburg Working Group. It brought the City’s leadership together with national and provincial government, business and civil society, with the aim of stabilising its finances, improving service delivery and reviving the CBD (The Presidency, 2025). Yet sustained action has proven elusive, and the local government elections to be held on 4 November 2026 have brought the crisis into sharp political focus, with Johannesburg’s troubles now openly contested for political gain.

The crisis is also widely seen as calling for structural reform. The revised White Paper on Local Government 2026, approved by Cabinet in September 2026, is the most significant review of local government law and policy since 1998 (Ntanzi, 2026; SAnews, 2026). Alongside it, the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill, 2024, known as the Coalitions Bill, aims to make local coalitions more stable, transparent and accountable (COGTA, 2024). National Treasury’s Metro Trading Services Reform (MTSR) is an initiative to address the financial and operational weaknesses undermining basic service delivery in South Africa’s eight metropolitan municipalities (National Treasury, 2026). Its central intervention is a performance-linked incentive programme, designed to encourage metros to ring-fence trading services, establish clear management responsibilities, improve financial transparency and reinvest revenue in infrastructure maintenance and expansion.

But good policy on paper does not guarantee change in practice, and not every problem can be legislated for. Institutions can adopt the ‘form’ of reform without its substance (Pritchett et al., 2013). Structural reforms are a necessary but insufficient intervention into the crisis. One reason for this is that although authority figures can identify the various signs and symptoms of breakdown in the immediate moment, these are treated as disparate failures, and not the interdependent effects of a broader crisis.

Making the crisis visible and understandable matters most at moments like this. In the GCRO’s wider work, we argue that the local government crisis is best understood as a ‘creeping crisis’ (Whitaker et al., forthcoming; Mkhize et al., 2026). Boin et al. (2020) coined the term to describe a threat to widely shared values or life-sustaining systems that builds up slowly and nonlinearly, over time and across space. Climate change is a familiar example. A creeping crisis is foreshadowed by precursor events, seemingly disconnected disasters that act as signs of deeper trouble. Public and political attention rises and falls with each disaster, and authorities respond to the immediate effects, such as restoring water after an outage, but rarely to the conditions that produced it. This allows it to smoulder in the background until it reaches a tipping point, where the system can no longer absorb the strain of the crisis, and destructive impacts become acute and irreversible (Studebaker, 2023).

Most creeping crisis research looks at how the state detects and manages external threats. In our analysis we treat local government itself as the site of the creeping crisis (Mkhize et al., 2026). As the threats accumulate, they erode the local government systems that sustain quality of life, such as basic services, and in turn, the shared values on which government legitimacy depends.

Our view is that political and structural responses must begin with seeing the local government crisis as a connected whole in this sense, rather than a series of separate failures across the various dimensions of local governance. Only then can we take hold of what the crisis also offers: an opportunity to transform the institutions, conditions and actors that sustain it.

This Map of the Month builds on this analytical perspective. It draws on four rounds of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s (GCRO) Quality of Life (QoL) Survey to construct a crisis index that measures how negatively residents perceive local government services, institutions and representatives, as well as their neighbourhood. Data from QoL 4 (2015/16) and QoL 5 (2017/18) is pooled into one period, and QoL 6 (2020/21) and QoL 7 (2023/24) into another. Map 1 shows the index for 2015-2018, and Map 2 for 2021-2024, across the 526 wards to be contested in November. Using the same ward boundaries, Map 3 shows how the index changed between the two periods. Together, the maps illustrate the spatial variability of the crisis, where it is concentrated and how this has changed over time.

Measuring the creeping crisis of local government

The GCRO’s QoL Survey asks residents about local government services, institutions and councillors, and about their neighbourhood. Four rounds of the survey were pooled into two periods, as set out in Table 1. The first period, 2015-2018, combines QoL 4 (conducted in 2015/16) and QoL 5 (2017/18), with 54,894 respondents. The second period, 2020-2024, combines QoL 6 (2020/21) and QoL 7 (2023/24), with 27,415 respondents. The first roughly coincides with the rise of hung councils and coalitions after the 2016 local government elections, while the second spans the COVID-19 pandemic, the loadshedding crisis, and more recent service delivery failings, notably in water and waste.

Table 1: Survey periods used for Maps 1, 2 and 3, the surveys pooled in Maps 1 and 2 and the number of respondents.

For this Map of the Month, a crisis index was developed from ten questions asked across all four surveys. Nine questions asked residents how satisfied they were with water, sanitation, waste removal, energy, roads, streetlights, their local municipality, their ward councillor and their neighbourhood. Answers ranged from very satisfied to very dissatisfied. The tenth question asked whether their community had improved or deteriorated. Answers of dissatisfied or very dissatisfied counted as negative, as did saying the community had deteriorated, saying there are no streetlights, and not knowing who the ward councillor is. Neutral answers were counted as not negative, and residents who refused to answer were excluded.

For each question, the unweighted percentage of respondents in each ward who answered negatively was calculated. The crisis index is the average of these ten percentages (i.e. 10 percentages divided by 10), so each question carries equal weight. The index therefore ranges from 0, where no one answered any question negatively, to 100, where every single respondent answered every question negatively. A score of 37, for example, means that 37% of respondents gave, on average, negative responses across the ten questions.

For the spatial analysis, we used the GPS coordinates of the place where respondents were surveyed to assign each to one of the Gauteng wards delineated by the Municipal Demarcation Board for the 2026 local government elections. This was done for each of the respondents across the four surveys, 82 309 in total. Hence, the results from the two periods, 2015-2018 and 2020-2024, are compared in the same, new, ward geography. This does however mean that respondents were allocated to newly defined wards that will have different boundaries from the ones that they were originally interviewed in, by logical extension affecting the spread of respondents per ward in the original sampling process. Since the number of respondents per ward for each index period is the combination of two QoL surveys there are sufficient numbers for each ward to draw a valid result, except in a few cases. In one ward the assignment resulted in just two respondents.

The crisis index 2015-2018

Map 1 shows the crisis index for each ward in 2015-2018. Wards are shaded from yellow for low scores to purple and navy for high scores, on a scale from 5 to 80 points. Across Gauteng, the index was 28.0, meaning that across the ten indicators, an average of 28% answered negatively.

Map 1: Crisis index per ward, 2015-2018. 2026 wards. Mouse over the legend bar to see which wards fall into the different brackets. Mouse over any ward to see its exact index results. Unweighted. Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 4 (2015/16) and 5 (2017/18).

The five highest-scoring wards are Rand West Ward 29 (71.6), Ekurhuleni Ward 21 (70.8), Rand West Ward 34 (69.5), and Tshwane Wards 24 and 13 (65.0 and 63.3), respectively. The five lowest-scoring wards are Midvaal Ward 14 (7.8), Johannesburg Ward 90 (9.2), Ekurhuleni Ward 19 (9.8), and Johannesburg Wards 88 and 132 (10.0 and 10.1, respectively). Table 2 below lists the ten highest and lowest-scoring wards on the crisis index for this period.

The map shows a clear core-periphery pattern. The lowest scores, shaded yellow to orange, form a block across the established suburbs of the metros, Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni – the province’s main economic nodes. A smaller patch of lighter yellow-to-orange wards sits in Midvaal (around Meyerton / Henley-on-Klip). Within this core, however, pockets of rose, purple and navy wards indicate high crisis scores. These mark the inner cities of the metros and township areas such as Soweto, Katlehong and Mamelodi.

The highest scoring wards lie on the edges of the province. In the west, dark orange to purple and navy wards cover much of Mogale City, Rand West City and Merafong City municipalities. This belt represents Gauteng’s post-mining landscapes, marked by declining economic activity, environmental damage and persistent spatial inequality (Ayuningtyas, 2014; Bobbins et al., 2018). In the north, a band of large peri-urban and rural wards covers north-western Tshwane around Hammanskraal and Soshanguve, areas that are far from jobs and economic activity. Wards in eastern Tshwane around Bronkhorstspruit and much of Lesedi also score high on the crisis index.

Table 2: The ten highest and ten lowest crisis index scores per ward, 2015-2018. *Ekurhuleni Ward 1 had only two respondents in this period. Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 4 (2015/16) and 5 (2017/18).

The crisis index 2020-2024

Map 2 shows the crisis index for each ward in 2020-2024. It uses the same colours and scale as Map 1, and it has darkened almost everywhere. The Gauteng-wide crisis index rose from 28.0 to 36.7. In turn, the whole distribution also shifted upwards, with the median ward rising from 26.4 to 36.0 and the 75th percentile from 35.7 to 46.4.

Map 2: Crisis index per ward, 2020-2024. Mouse over the legend bar to see which wards fall into the different brackets. Mouse over any ward to see its exact index results. 2026 wards. Unweighted. Data source: Data source: Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 6 (2020/21) and 5 (2023/24).

The five highest-scoring wards in this period are Emfuleni Ward 36 (75.8), Emfuleni Ward 20 (72.5), Ekurhuleni Ward 21 (72.0), and Emfuleni Wards 43 and 29 (70.7 and 69.1, respectively). The five lowest-scoring wards are are Midvaal Wards 14 and 2 (7.4 and 7.6), Johannesburg Ward 73 (11.1), Midvaal Ward 3 (12.3) and Johannesburg Ward 23 (13.8). Table 3 below lists the ten highest and lowest-scoring wards on the crisis index for this period.

By 2020-2024, the map has darkened almost everywhere. The yellow core has shrunk to central and northern Johannesburg and southern Tshwane, and many of the wards in these areas have turned to the darker orange, meaning that creeping crisis has spread across spatial and class lines, into areas once largely insulated from it. Around this core, many wards, including much of Ekurhuleni, have shifted from yellow to orange and rose. The pockets of purple and navy wards, indicative of the township and inner-city areas, within the core have also grown darker and more numerous, especially in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni.

The edges of the province remain the darkest. In the west, purple-to-navy wards still cover much of Mogale City, Rand West City and Merafong City, with a cluster of navy wards around Westonaria. Together with Emfuleni, they form a near-continuous arc of high-crisis wards along Gauteng’s western and south-western edge, following the old gold-mining belt and the industrial south. In the north, a band of purple-to-navy wards stretches across northern Tshwane, from Soshanguve to Hammanskraal, where wards have turned from rose to deep purple. In the east, the large wards around Bronkhorstspruit and most of Lesedi’s wards remain purple. The few wards that lightened are mostly large outer wards that began with very high scores. Although their scores improved, several remain in the top quarter of wards – they remain in a state of crisis.

The most striking change is in the south. Emfuleni, the steel and industrial centre around Vereeniging and Vanderbijlpark, was mid-range in 2015-2018, yet its wards are now the darkest in Gauteng – seven out of the 10 highest-scoring wards for 2020-2024 are in Emfuleni, with crisis scores ranging from 66.6 to 75.8. Its more peri-urban and agricultural Sedibeng neighbours changed far less. Some of Midvaal’s wards improved, and its patch of yellow wards in the north remains light.

Table 3: The ten highest and ten lowest crisis index scores per ward, 2020-2024. Rand West Ward 34 also scored 66.6. Data source: Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 6 (2020/21) and 5 (2023/24).

Change in the crisis index 2015-2018 and 2020-2024

Map 3 shows the change in each ward’s crisis index between the two periods, calculated by subtracting its 2015-2018 score from its 2020-2024 score, so that positive values, shaded red, show a deepening crisis and negative values, shaded green show an improvement.

If we consider a change of more than 5 points as a meaningful rise or fall, the index rose in 388 of 526 wards, or in 73.8% of wards across the province, between the two periods. A further 125 wards, or 23.8%, stayed about the same. Only 13 wards, or 2.5%, improved.

The five wards with the largest rises in the crisis index are Emfuleni Ward 29, which rose by 32.5 points, Mogale City Ward 28, up 29.7 points, and Emfuleni Wards 43, 24 and 19, up 29.1, 29.0 and 28.9 points, respectively. Seven of the ten largest rises were in Emfuleni, in spite of a sustained Gauteng Provincial Government intervention in this municipality. Mogale City Ward 28 stands out because it started low, at 16.5, and rose to 46.3. The five wards with the largest falls are Mogale City Ward 16, which fell by 16.6 points; Johannesburg Ward 40, down 14.8 points; Merafong Ward 4 and Midvaal Ward 12, down 10.8 and 10.6 points, respectively; and Tshwane Ward 70, down 9.0 points. The falls were smaller than the rises and spread across seven municipalities. Most were in wards that started very high, such as Merafong Ward 4, which still scored 50.4 in 2020-2024.

Map 3: Change in the crisis index per ward between 2015-2018 and 2020-2024, in percentage points, on a scale from lowest value (-16.6%) to highest (32.5%). Green shows a fall (an improvement in the index) and red shows a rise (deterioration in the index). Mouse over the legend bar to see the wards that have improved or deteriorated across the spectrum. 2026 wards. Unweighted data. Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Map 3 is dominated by red, showing that the crisis deepened in most wards across the province. The deepest red, marking rises of 20 points or more, runs across the south-west of the province. It is concentrated in Emfuleni, clusters of wards in Rand West City and Merafong City, and a stretch of wards across southern and western Johannesburg. This is the same south-western arc that appears on Map 2. Here, the crisis deepened the most, reaching its highest levels. There is also a significant deepening of the crisis index in much of Ekurhuleni and in parts of Tshwane such as Pretoria Central and around Soshanguve.

In the metro cores of Tshwane, Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, most wards are shaded pale pink to mid-red. Scores there rose more modestly, from a lower base. Yet very few wards in the core turned green, suggesting that even the province’s best-performing areas have not escaped the creeping crisis. Small, darker red wards stand out within this patchwork, many of them in the township and inner-city areas identified on Map 2.

Across the province, green wards are few, indicating that the crisis index showed improvement in only a small minority of wards. Most are large peripheral wards that started with very high scores, in north-western and eastern Tshwane, in Rand West City, on the eastern edge of Mogale City and in Midvaal. Several of these wards remain in the top quarter of the province, so a fall in score does not necessarily mean significant recovery.

Figure 1 shows the same pattern at the municipal level. The index rose in every municipality, but by very different degrees. In 2015-2018, the nine municipalities sat close together, between 25.5 and 37.4, but by 2020-2024 they had pulled apart. Emfuleni rose most, by 19.7 points to 57.1, nearly 10 points above the next highest, Merafong, at 47.7. Rand West City followed at 43.9. These old mining and industrial municipalities of the west and south are where the deepest red wards cluster on Map 3. The three metros of Tshwane, Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni rose by 6.9, 7.6 and 8.8 percentage points respectively, to 36.5 in Tshwane, 32.9 in Johannesburg and 35.3 in Ekurhuleni. Intriguingly, while Johannesburg has received enormous media attention and been the subject of a Presidential intervention it was not the municipality that deteriorated the most between the two periods.

Some areas changed little. Lesedi and Mogale City, which had wards mostly shaded pale peach in Map 3, stayed with relatively low index scores between 2015-18 and 2020-21. Midvaal barely changed, rising 1.6 points to 27.0. As a result, the gap between the highest- and lowest-scoring municipalities widened from 12 points to 30.

Figure 1: Crisis index by municipality in 2015–2018 and 2020–2024, and the change in percentage points. Unweighted. Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 4, 5, 6 and 7.

The change map shows where the crisis has deepened. Yet a creeping crisis is defined less by sudden shifts than by slow accumulation. Failures pile up over years, often unnoticed, until they become part of everyday life. Nor do they compound evenly in a linear fashion; a creeping crisis takes hold most firmly where inequality has already left communities with the least capacity to absorb shocks (Mkhize et al., 2026). To find where the crisis has accumulated in this way, wards in persistent crisis were identified. These are wards in Gauteng’s highest-scoring quarter in both periods, at or above the 75th percentile each time. That means scores of at least 35.7 in 2015-2018 and at least 46.4 in 2020-2024. Ninety-four wards, or 18% of the total, fall into the persistent crisis category. Persistence is defined relative to the rest of the province. The threshold rose with the provincial distribution, so a ward whose score increased but failed to keep pace dropped out of the category, even as conditions worsened. The creeping crisis is most widespread in Emfuleni, where 26 of 45 wards are in persistent crisis, and in Merafong, where 12 of 25 are. By contrast, only 12 of the 135 wards in Johannesburg are deemed to be in persistent crisis, and similarly in Ekurhuleni, Lesedi and Midvaal fewer than one in ten wards are affected.

Figure 2 shows the ten wards with the highest crisis index scores in both periods. All ten wards scored above 56 in both periods, about twice the Gauteng level, well above the Gauteng averages of 28.0 and 36.7. For some wards, the two dots sit close together. Their scores barely moved, which means the crisis there is long-standing rather than new. Half of these wards are in Tshwane. Ekurhuleni Ward 21 is a particularly severe case, with very high scores across both periods, at 70.8 in 2015-2018 and 72.0 in 2020-2024. Emfuleni Ward 36 is the one ward whose score changed very dramatically – it rose by 18 points, from 57.7 to 75.8, and is now the highest-scoring ward in Gauteng. There are a few wards – for example ward 29 in Rand West and ward 8 in Midvaal – that saw improvements over the two periods, even though they remained amongst the top ten highest crisis wards.

Figure 2: Crisis index in 2015-2018 and 2020-2024 for the ten wards with the highest scores in both periods. All ten wards scored above 56 in both periods, well above the Gauteng averages of 28.0 for 2015-2018 and 36.7 for 2020-2024. Unweighted. Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 4, 5, 6 and 7.

The crisis index by demographic characteristics

The maps show where the crisis is concentrated and how this has changed over time. Figure 3 turns to who experiences it most acutely. It compares the crisis index across five respondent characteristics in 2020-2024: sex, educational attainment, dwelling type, population group and household income. The Gauteng average for this period, 36.7, provides a point of comparison.

Figure 3: Crisis index by demographic group, 2020-2024. Unweighted. The two highest income bands have small samples of 148 and 92 respondents. Data source: GCRO Quality of Life Surveys 6 and 7.

Sex shows no meaningful difference, with men scoring 36.5 and women 36.8. Educational attainment shows a modest gradient. The index falls from 42.6 among respondents with no schooling to 30.5 among those with a post-matric qualification, with the steepest decline after matric.

Three characteristics are more strongly associated with negative experiences of local government. The first, and most pronounced, is dwelling type. Residents of informal dwellings record an index of 56.5, compared with 33.3 in formal dwellings.

The second is household income. The index declines consistently as income rises, from 44.4 among households earning R1 to R800 a month to 18.2 among those earning R102 401 to R204 800.

The third is population group. Black African and Coloured respondents score 39.0 and 38.1, respectively. This is approximately 12 to 14 percentage points higher than Indian/Asian (26.5) and white (25.5) respondents.

These characteristics are interrelated and should not be read as independent effects. Together, however, they indicate that the crisis may be felt most acutely by poorer households, by residents of informal dwellings and by Black African and Coloured residents, groups historically excluded from economic opportunity. This is consistent with the argument that the impacts of a creeping crisis are shaped by antecedent conditions of inequality (Mkhize et al., 2026).

Conclusion

This Map of the Month set out to make visible a creeping crisis that is difficult to see, comprehend and analyse. Mapped ward by ward, residents’ satisfaction with basic services and local government reveals a crisis that has accumulated gradually, deepened almost everywhere and settled most firmly in the province’s most marginalised communities. The crisis index rose in every municipality and in nearly three out of four wards. It is most severe in the old mining and industrial municipalities of the west and south, particularly Emfuleni, and in the townships and inner cities of the metros. Ninety-four persistent crisis wards remained in the top quarter across both periods. In these wards, the creeping crisis has become part of everyday life.

By drawing on residents’ own accounts, the index helps address the perceptibility problem, rendering visible a crisis that is complex and unevenly felt. Future research could test whether high crisis scores are associated with political behaviour, compare residents’ perceptions with administrative service delivery data, and explore through qualitative work how residents in persistent crisis wards live with the creeping crisis.

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Inputs, edits, and comments: Graeme Götz, Christian Hamann, Dr Samkelisiwe Khanyile, Dr Laven Naidoo

Suggested citation: Whitaker, S. (2026). Mapping the creeping crisis in Gauteng. GCRO Map of the Month, October 2026. Gauteng City-Region Observatory, Johannesburg. https://doi.org/10.36634/HNPQ4358