When âit must be Sundayâ becomes a punchline, something needs to be fixed

This story has significance for readers across Africa and beyond.

Thereâs a joke that runs through the Ward 88 WhatsApp group most weekends. Someone posts that the powerâs gone again â usually on a Saturday afternoon, often on a Sunday morning â and within minutes somebody else replies: âOh, it must be Sunday.â But no one laughs. Itâs not that kind of joke. Itâs the one you make when the alternative is to keep being angry about something that never quite gets fixed.

Iâve lived in Risidale, Ward 88, Johannesburg, for 12 years now. I chose it, like a lot of people choose these older, leafier Johannesburg suburbs, because it was quiet. Not exciting. Just quiet, close to everything and, at the time, reliably serviced. That last bit wasnât really among our criteria when we were looking. We expected water from the taps, the streetlights to work, rubbish to be collected, potholes to be filled â you know, the stuff your rates and taxes should logically cover.

I arrived in Johannesburg in 2002, a migrant worker from KwaZulu-Natal. Then, the potholes werenât like this. The power stayed on. Water pressure was consistent, not something you learnt to plan a shower around.

Degraded formal service

Iâm not describing a golden age. Joburg has always had inequality snaking through its streets, always had suburbs that got everything and townships that got nothing, and that injustice long predates the current administration. But the formal service delivery that existed for those who did get services has degraded markedly over the past two decades. And those who did not, live in even worsening conditions.

In Ward 88, we lose power almost weekly and for stretches that regularly run to more than 12 hours.

The potholes on our roads sometimes get filled, but when the first decent rain arrives the patch job is washed away.

Crime is a low, constant hum of anxiety that most of us have responded to not by demanding better policing, but by paying privately for security companies to do a job that used to sit with the state. We have built a shadow municipality out of debit orders for security, back-up water supply, solar power and area upkeep.

The temptation is to blame the municipal worker who answers the callout or the truck that arrives late. That would be wrong. Responsibility logically sits with City leadership â both administrative and political â and with the financial mismanagement, coalition instability and decades of deferred infrastructure maintenance that have compounded under their watch.

Joburgâs finances make it hard to fund the work of fixing infrastructure before it fails. But that doesnât explain a pothole that reappears in the same spot every year.

But Jozi still works in places, and it works best where it has stopped waiting for the municipality alone to fix things.

In Risidale, a resident-funded initiative called Letâs Work has taken on the unglamorous job of keeping the area clean and functional. Its founder has also built the kind of relationship with the City that gets problems escalated and, with patience, resolved.

These parallel structures shouldnât have to exist. But residents have learnt that waiting for services would be like waiting for Godot. The same pattern holds across multiple cities, in different forms and wherever business and civil society have stepped into the gap left by administrative failure.

Gap

That gap â between what a resident-funded group can achieve on a suburban street and what an entire metro needs â is the subject of Daily Maverickâs Gathering Cities edition.

This isnât a story about one wardâs power cuts, or my potholes, or your suburbâs community WhatsApp group. Itâs about what happens to a country when its cities, the places where most South Africans actually live and work, stop functioning as cities are meant to.

Weâre bringing together the reporting, the data and the people working on the front lines of urban service delivery to ask whatâs actually fixable, what isnât and what it will take.

Weâre building the edition around the good, the bad, the ugly and the surprising: the wins nobody talks about, the failures everybodyâs tired of, the everyday dysfunction thatâs become background noise and the curveballs nobody saw coming. Weâll be pushing past the anecdotes â mine included â into the harder question underneath all of them: Are our municipalities beyond saving, or is there still a way back?

Among a stellar line-up, Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke, who has spent years auditing exactly the financial mismanagement residents feel through a lack of services, will help us sit with the tough question: Are our metros simply too big to fail, or have we been telling ourselves that for too long while they fail anyway?

I donât know what the answer is, but thatâs the point of gathering in the same room to thrash it out.

Join us in person at The Gathering: Cities Edition, 11 September 2026, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre or online, right here.

Bring your own âOh, it must be Sundayâ story. Weâre collecting them. DM

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.