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President Ramaphosa has defended the £31 million clean-up of a city mired in drugs, corruption and decaying infrastructure and has promised to maintain it
Workers remove informal structures occupied by the homeless as part of Johannesburg’s clean-up campaign
ALET PRETORIUS/REUTERS
Kate Bartlett, Johannesburg
Sunday November 16 2025, 11.00pm GMT, The Times
Vhutshilo, an Uber driver, gestures with annoyance at workers busily planting flowers along the verge of a major road into Sandton, a glitzy Johannesburg suburb known as Africa’s richest square mile. “You see this,” he says, “it shows they do have resources.”
His gripe is that the government is only spending money and getting things done to impress foreign visitors before the G20 summit next weekend, while the city’s steady decay has been ignored for years and millions of its residents suffer frequent electricity and water cuts, even in the wealthy suburbs.
Hosting the conference is costing the country about £31 million, of which urban improvement is only a part. While most cities preparing for high-profile events may attempt to present their best image, the cosmetic clean-up of Johannesburg has been likened to the creation of a Potemkin village.
Municipal workers “beautify” the city
JEROME DELAY/AP
Hidden from the view of the motorcades that will carry Sir Keir Starmer and other heads of some of the richest countries in the world will be the formerly trendy suburb of Hillbrow.
Here, rubbish piles up outside abandoned husks of buildings taken over by gangs and addicts save money by “bluetoothing” — injecting themselves with blood drawn from another user already high on nyaope, a drug made from rat poison, HIV medicine and low-grade heroin.
Prodded by President Ramaphosa, who lives in Johannesburg but expressed “shock” at its dilapidated state when the summit loomed, the municipality says there has been “a major overhaul of the electricity network, with over 30 substations undergoing maintenance and upgrades” and a strengthening of “critical water infrastructure”.
President Ramaphosa
XABISO MKHABELA/XINHUA/ALAMY
Ramaphosa, left, plants trees in Walter Sisulu Square in Kliptown, Soweto
After apartheid, infrastructure once only intended for the white minority suddenly had to serve the majority, placing it under strain. In more recent years barely functional municipal coalition governments, corruption and a revolving door of mayors have only spurred the rot of what was once known in Zulu as “Egoli”, or the City of Gold.
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In the run-up to the G20 Johannesburg city council has been fixing dozens of broken traffic lights, filling potholes and resurfacing roads, while “beautification initiatives are ongoing”.
Roadworks in Braamfontein, Johannesburg
EMMANUEL CROSET/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Johannesburg’s pothole problem is so bad that residents have wryly taken to spray-painting the craters with “thank you ANC”, in reference to the African National Congress. In a stunt this year the Democratic Alliance (DA), which is part of a coalition government, held a birthday party, with a cake, for a particularly large hole that had been dug by maintenance workers a year before and had remained untouched.
In July the mayor of Johannesburg, Dada Morero, declared “a war on potholes” after promising to “make Joburg great again”.
The revamp isn’t cheap. Last week the finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, announced he was increasing the budget of the Department of International Relations and Co-operation by £4.4 million to fill a G20 funding shortfall.
South Africa has a youth unemployment rate of about 50 per cent. It also has some of the highest crime rates in the world, especially gender-based violence, with a woman being murdered every two and half hours. The ANC has failed to get a handle on crime and women’s rights groups are planning a nationwide “shutdown” on Friday before the meeting to draw attention to the crisis.
A woman and her children in an informal settlement in central Johannesburg
PER-ANDERS PETTERSSON/GETTY IMAGES
The hosting of the event has been mired in controversy. President Trump, who berated Ramaphosa during his visit to the Oval Office in May, is boycotting it because he says the government is seizing white-owned land and allowing the “slaughter” of Afrikaners, both false claims, while objecting to the summit’s theme of solidarity, equality and sustainability.
President Ramaphosa and President Trump at the White House in May
KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
Even two of South Africa’s great allies, China’s President Xi and Russia’s President Putin, aren’t coming. The former, for reasons unknown, is sending his number two, while the latter faces arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant over Ukraine.
At home there has also been disgruntlement. The right-wing Afrikaner group Solidarity, in efforts to tarnish the event, last week installed huge billboards outside the G20 venue welcoming delegates to “the most race-regulated country in the world”, a reference to South Africa’s black economic empowerment laws, loathed by the billionaire Elon Musk, who was born in Pretoria.
The billboards were swiftly taken down by the local government, which said Solidarity didn’t have the necessary permission.
• Afrikaners granted asylum in US are cowards, says Ramaphosa
After criticism in parliament from the DA, Ramaphosa defended Johannesburg’s revamp, saying: “In any household when visitors come they do a cleaning up.”
Ramaphosa, who donned worker’s overalls to participate in one of the clean-up events, symbolically planting trees last week, insists the work to fix Johannesburg will continue after the guests depart. “As they leave, we must then insist that what we have done and seen done must continue,” he vowed.
Vhutshilo is sceptical. “They don’t care about ordinary people,” he said.
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