Can Johannesburg Still Be Fixed?
There is a particular kind of despair that hangs over conversations about Johannesburg. You hear it in jokes, in warnings, in the way people speak about the inner city as though collapse is no longer a crisis but a settled fact. The roads are broken. The buildings are crumbling. The systems are stretched. The instinct, for many, is to move further out and hope the trouble does not follow.
That instinct is exactly what this episode of Both Sides refuses.
In conversation with Randall Abrahams, Innocent Mabusela, CEO of Jozi My Jozi, argues that Johannesburg should not be abandoned, written off, or treated like a lost cause. More importantly, he argues that fixing it cannot be reduced to surface-level clean-ups or neat public relations exercises. If a city is broken, the repair job has to be structural, social and shared.
One of the strongest ideas in the episode is that urban renewal is not really about infrastructure alone. Buildings, parks, bridges and streets matter. But they sit inside a wider human reality. Mabusela makes the point plainly: you cannot fix infrastructure if
you do not deal with social issues on the ground. That immediately shifts the conversation from aesthetics to systems. Safety matters. Security matters. Public transport matters. Homelessness matters. The way people move through a city, use a city, fear a city, and take ownership of a city matters too.
That is also why the Jozi My Jozi model is so interesting. The organisation does not present itself as a heroic substitute for government. In fact, Mabusela is explicit that projects only matter if government can eventually take them over and sustain them. That is a subtle but important distinction. It acknowledges the gap in delivery without normalising a future where public accountability is permanently outsourced. The episode keeps returning to this balance: civic action matters, but it cannot become an excuse for the state to disappear.
The homelessness discussion sharpens that point even more. Rather than staying in the comfortable space of vague compassion, the conversation gets practical. Mabusela describes efforts to understand the scale and nature of homelessness in Johannesburg, and a phased support model designed to move people toward food access, counselling, work opportunities, shelter and eventual reintegration. The significance here is not that the problem is easy. It clearly is not. The significance is that the episode treats homelessness as something that requires design, coordination and sustained thought, not just momentary guilt.
But the line that lingers most is the warning that if Johannesburg is not sorted out, the trouble does not stay there. It moves outward. Rosebank. Sandton. Waterfall. The point is not just geographic. It is moral. You cannot outrun urban decay forever by building a cleaner island somewhere else.
That may be the episode’s sharpest contribution. Johannesburg is not someone else’s mess. It is a test of whether South Africans still believe broken systems can be repaired, and whether hope can be organised into action.
Catch up on all Both Sides episodes here: https://www.enca.com/both-sides-podcast