Piles of rubbish, power cuts and potholes: anger grows over Johannesburg’s run-down infrastructure

One week before the local elections in South Africa, the pavements and roads of the Johannesburg township Alexandra were filled with piles of rubbish, rotting in the heat. At the Jukskei River, its banks choked with rubble and litter, foul-smelling brown water flowed out of a culvert.

“We’ve got way too many challenges,” said Semadi Manganye, the chief executive of Alexandra Water Warriors, an environmental NGO that organises clean-ups of the river and plants trees on its banks. “If it’s not electricity, it’s water. If it’s not water, it’s waste.”

8 million between the 2011 and 2022 censuses. “I have an understanding of why they’re failing,” he said. “But we’ve got to mitigate against this – we knew that it was going to happen.”