Joblessness climbs in Johannesburg and Tshwane as voters weigh water, crime and work

South Africans vote in municipal elections on November 4, and in the country’s biggest cities the campaign has settled on three concerns: water that does not arrive, work that does not exist, and safety that cannot be taken for granted. As Sunday World reported on 2 November, basic services, unemployment and crime top the agenda in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban.

What a South African reader brings to that list is the detail underneath it, and the detail differs sharply from city to city.

Start with water. About a third of Johannesburg’s water supply is lost, according to the annual report of the city’s water agency, with ageing infrastructure, burst pipes, leaks and illegal connections among the main causes. Tshwane, which includes Pretoria, faces similar strain from ageing water and electricity networks and maintenance backlogs. In eThekwini, which includes Durban, the city’s oversight report puts losses at more than half of supply before it reaches paying customers, again through ageing infrastructure, leaks and illegal connections. Cape Town has put significant investment into water, electricity and transport infrastructure to keep pace with population growth, though long-term water-security risks remain a concern there too.

Those losses are not an abstraction. They are the reservoir level behind a closed school tap, the pressure that fails on a high-lying street, the bill a household pays for water it never received.

On jobs, the metros are not one labour market. Johannesburg’s unemployment rate rose to 35.9% in the second quarter from 33.0% a year earlier, and Tshwane’s increased to 34.2% from 30.8%, according to Statistics South Africa. Cape Town recorded 21.9% and eThekwini 21.2%, the lowest among the major metros. eThekwini has now overtaken Cape Town on that measure, and employment in the municipality increased by about 90,000 over the past year to 1.29 million.

The gap between roughly one in three out of work in Johannesburg and Tshwane and roughly one in five in Cape Town and eThekwini is the single sharpest divide in this election. It shapes what voters in each city expect a council to do, and what they will judge it on afterwards.

Crime remains a major concern across the largest cities, though the police statistics for the first quarter show improvement in some categories. Murders, carjackings and aggravated robberies declined in Tshwane from a year earlier. In Johannesburg, murders and carjackings also fell, though violent crime remains high. Cape Town recorded fewer murders than a year earlier, but gang violence continues to drive killings in parts of the city. In eThekwini, carjackings and aggravated robberies declined while murder and attempted murder remained elevated.

Housing and affordability sit underneath all of it. Rapid urbanisation is placing pressure on affordable housing and municipal services in most municipalities. Cape Town has attracted an influx of people and businesses and benefited from a strong tourism recovery after the COVID pandemic, but rising property prices, short-term rentals and rental demand have taken their toll. Tshwane faces increasing demand for housing and basic services, and in eThekwini sanitation backlogs remain a challenge in some communities.

The election is a municipal one, and that matters to how these numbers should be read. Councils run water reticulation, electricity distribution, refuse, roads and local planning. They do not set national labour policy, and the unemployment figures above are measured by Statistics South Africa across whole metros rather than by any single council’s decisions. What a voter can hold a municipality to is the pipe that is repaired, the meter that is read, the leak that is closed and the housing roll that moves.

Sunday World’s account of the campaign is accurate on the facts it carries, and its framing of services, jobs and crime as the issues shaping the vote matches what the record shows in each metro. The Enquirer adds the city-by-city figures here so that a reader can see where the pressure is heaviest and where the contrast is sharpest.

Polling day is 4 November. The Enquirer will report the results as they are declared, metro by metro, against the numbers above.