Last week in The Common Sense, David Ansara outlined what it would take to arrest Johannesburg’s accelerating collapse.
His three prescriptions – privatisation, deregulation, and decentralisation – align precisely with the Free Market Foundation (FMF)’s longstanding analysis of municipal malaise in South Africa. This sentiment is thoroughly elaborated in my 2024 paper for the FMF’s Campaign for Home Rule, “Ask Forgiveness, Not Permission: Practical Steps Towards Home Rule in South Africa”.
The fourth element of David’s column – political realism – is in many respects the most important.
Realism, properly understood, does not mean accepting whatever appears immediately convenient, but distinguishing the merely difficult from the truly impossible and then acting with purpose to achieve the former.
Johannesburg, a metropolis whose population is comparable to that of Denmark, Norway, or New Zealand, cannot be rescued by defaulting to the same centralising, over-regulating, and cost-socialising habits that the African National Congress (ANC) used to produce its present collapsing condition.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) stands, at the time of writing, on the threshold of assuming or sharing substantially in the governance of South Africa’s economic core after the November 2026 election. This is a moment of genuine consequence.
After David’s column, we had the opportunity to hear the response, by senior DA figures well-placed to shape the party’s approach to the city, to the case for privatisation, deregulation, and decentralisation. The response was predictable and, in its fundamentals, disappointing.
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