Johannesburg launches G20 makeover ahead of South Africa summit

In the gritty southern Johannesburg suburb where global leaders will gather for the G20 leaders summit this weekend, a small army of workers was deployed to spruce up the area — planting flowers, fixing street lights and filling potholes.

But when the newly installed lights and billboards were vandalised or stolen earlier this month, officials responded furiously.

The defacements were not the everyday petty crime that plagues the city’s 6mn residents, said Panyaza Lesufi, the African National Congress premier of Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg.

Instead, Lesufi said, it was part of a “campaign of sabotage, designed to undermine and tarnish the image of our province and country as we prepare to welcome global leaders” — and the perpetrators would face “the full extent of the law”.

The heavy-handed response baffled many residents of Africa’s richest city, where this sort of vandalism is not only common but usually ignored by the authorities.

While for many citizens the G20 has been a point of pride, it has also become a lightning rod for anger over the R194mn ($11mn) set aside for hosting the summit in a dysfunctional city characterised by frequent water shortages, potholed roads and inner-city high-rises hijacked by ganglords.

Tumelo Modise, a part-time security guard waiting to catch an overcrowded bus home, said he was “not impressed” by the flurry of clean-ups. “You start feeling like you owe [the government] praise, but all this is something they should have been doing anyway.”

In recent days, a G20 sign near the conference venue was defaced with graffiti that read simply “jobs???” — a reference to a national unemployment crisis that has left one in three people unable to find work.

The reaction to the vandalism by officials illustrates how disconnected political leaders have become, civic organisations said. 

“City officials cry sabotage when people paint on their G20 signs, but they don’t seem to realise quite how angry the residents are,” said Ferrial Adam, executive director of WaterCan, a watchdog group lobbying to improve water access in Johannesburg.

Residents “see how the city is just desperately papering over the cracks for the G20 meetings”, Adam said. “They know that as soon as the global leaders leave, it will be back to water shortages, potholes and dysfunction.”

Beyond being whisked to the conference centre itself, which is near the township of Soweto on Johannesburg’s southern edge, few delegates are expected to venture beyond the city’s leafy northern suburbs, which are largely spared from the crime-ridden, squatter-occupied buildings and crumbling infrastructure.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last week defended the clean-up as part of a broader reform of service delivery. “In making sure that we welcome our visitors and as they leave, we must then insist that what we have done and seen done must continue.”

Political instability means the city has cycled through nine different mayors since 2021, and shaky coalition parties have been unable to make critical budget and governance decisions.

Elijah Mhlanga, a spokesperson for the provincial government, conceded that the decay in Johannesburg “is obvious for all to see”, but said efforts to fix the city began long before the G20 arrived in South Africa and would not be temporary.

“The characterisation of the investment made into the rejuvenation of the city as superficial is extremely disturbing,” Mhlanga said.

Gugu Ndlovu, a domestic worker who lives in the rundown central business district, said she was pleasantly surprised last week to find piles of rotting litter had been cleared and informal traders’ stalls that crowded the pavements had been removed.

“It’s safe and clean now. You can walk down the street without stepping on rubbish. But . . . is it going to go back to the same afterwards?”

Yunus Chamda, a civic activist and member of the Joburg Crisis Alliance, said residents on the routes where the G20 leaders are expected to travel felt bittersweet about the improvements they had seen. “Residents have asked . . . if we can’t get the G20 back every year,” he added.

Rashid Seedat, the executive director of Gauteng City-Region Observatory, a think-tank that collects data on Johannesburg, argued that there was no reason the city — whose glittering business district houses the headquarters of 70 per cent of South African companies — can’t improve.

“If you’ve got the right governance, the leadership, and you bring in the right people in the bureaucracy, you can really turn things around,” said Seedat, who was involved in Johannesburg’s hosting of the World Cup in 2010.

South Africa has sought to use its G20 platform to push for lowering the cost of capital for poorer nations, addressing global inequality and securing an agreement on climate finance.

Its success in doing so will become clear after the weekend’s summit, but the forum has already been caught up in political point-scoring at home and abroad.

Last week, Solidarity, a right-wing Afrikaner group, erected a 70-metre billboard on a busy highway that read: “Welcome to the most race-regulated city in the world,” in reference to the country’s contentious Black empowerment laws.

While the pros and cons of the policies — introduced after apartheid to promote Black corporate ownership and employment — are hotly debated in South Africa, Solidarity’s position has over the past year found a champion in Donald Trump.

The US president has said “no US officials” would attend the summit because white Afrikaners were being “slaughtered” in South Africa, a false claim that he has repeatedly raised since retaking office.

“Most of us know race-baiting propaganda when we see it,” said Ferial Haffajee, a journalist with the Daily Maverick, of Solidarity’s banner. “And the performative ad was made for the US delegation that is now not coming.”