The recent parliamentary hearings on Johannesburg's audit results revealed a city of contradictions. We break them down and highlight the outstanding questions.

Johannesburg spent just 1% of its budget on infrastructure maintenance against an 8% benchmark, achieved only 36% of its infrastructure development targets, lost R8.5-billion through water and electricity losses and still has R7.6-billion worth of irregular expenditure under investigation, while 34 disciplinary cases and six criminal matters are being pursued, Parliament heard during recent hearings into the state of South Africa's largest city.

These were among the most shocking revelations to emerge from back-to-back briefings by the Auditor-General (AG) and City of Johannesburg officials before Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), which laid bare the scale of the challenges facing the metro - and the City's efforts to convince Parliament that it is turning the corner.

FREE NEWSLETTERWHAT JOBURG NEEDS TO KNOWSign up nowIn another striking contradiction, the City told Parliament it had resolved 82% of the previous year's Auditor-General findings, yet the AG still recorded 527 findings in 2024/25, up from 472 the year before. The discrepancy goes to the heart of the debate that dominated the hearings about whether Johannesburg is making meaningful progress in addressing years of governance failure, or whether improvements on paper are failing to translate into measurable improvements on the ground?

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