“Broken cars lie around and many residents put their rubbish out onto the streets and it lies there rotting.”
It was “far too dangerous” to walk around at night, he said. “The decay in this part of Johannesburg is massive.”
Mr Marais says the blame lies squarely with the municipality, where the African National Congress hold the most seats.
He said support for his party, the Democratic Alliance – ANC’s main opposition, has “definitely been growing in Johannesburg” since the last national elections in 2019, something he attributed at least in part to the dire state of the city.
Coupled with anger over long-standing corruption, poverty and unemployment, such grievances with ANC are set to have a seismic effect on the country’s political landscape when the country goes to the polls again on May 29.
Surveys indicate the party will lose its majority for the first time since the late Nelson Mandela brought it to power in 1994 following the collapse of apartheid.
If that happens, it will be a huge moment for South Africa.
Although the ANC would easily still be the biggest in parliament, it would be a hugely symbolic shift that speaks to the level of frustration with a party that was supposed to have lifted South Africa’s black majority out of poverty.
The woes facing most of Johannesburg’s nearly six million residents shows just how badly they are failing.
The city is the engine for South Africa’s economy, with luxury shops, world-class sports arenas, an international airport and first-class hospitals. In 2000, it was described as “a world-class African city”.
Yet the legacy of apartheid is still there.
Legacy of apartheid
There has been lots of work to improve Soweto, the biggest black township in South Africa, but mainly black areas in the east of Johannesburg are still all-but neglected.
Outside the townships, there has been an explosion of informal shelters in the centre of “old” Johannesburg where illegal immigrants live in crowded, filthy conditions with no running water or official electricity supplies.
Parts of the city have become no-go areas and deadly accidents are common. Last year, a fire broke out inside a building being squatted, killing at least 77 people.
Even in ordinary middle-class neighbourhoods, public areas are shabby, pavements are falling apart and some storm drains have trees growing out of them.
“We are concerned the anger and frustration of residents will give way to violent protests unless something is done now,” said Neeshan Balton, who chairs the Johannesburg Crisis Alliance.
The Alliance was formed last year to try to fix some of the issues facing the city.
It is made up of local residents, including infrastructure experts and business owners, who say the situation is so desperate that they will offer their services for free.
“We wrote to President Cyril Ramaphosa last year and told him that residents, workers and businesses were confronted with potholed streets, leaking water pipes, overflowing sewers, malfunctioning traffic lights and lawlessness,” he said.
“We also told him that daily electricity cuts were leaving businesses idle for hours, disrupting daily life and forcing residents to rely on ingenuity to navigate the chaos. This is still going on now, nothing has changed.”
But Mr Balton said Africa’s richest city was plagued by “massive” disinvestment which aggravated unemployment and rendered the streets unsafe.
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