This afternoon the City of Johannesburg stopped buying fuel for the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) fleet. The fleet is grounded. It has been grounded for over a week. There is no resolution date.

This is according to a press release from the city.

What does this mean for the city?

The JRA exists to maintain the road network. It currently cannot do that job because it has no fuel. So pothole repairs have stopped. Traffic signal crews cannot travel to fix broken lights. Emergency stormwater teams have no mobile capacity. Bridge inspections are deferred.

And what does this say about the city's finances?

Johannesburg has an annual budget of R86 billion and has an infrastructure backlog estimated at R200 billion. That it cannot settle a fuel account is a damning statement about where that R86 billion is going and who is managing it.

The MMC for Transport, Kenny Kunene, called it an operational emergency. He said the city is engaging urgently with its finance department to find a resolution. He did not say when one might arrive. In the meantime, residents were told to exercise caution, anticipate longer delays, and prepare for backlogs in infrastructure turnaround times. What Kunene is actually saying is that things will get worse before they get better, and we cannot tell you when better is coming.

The city's financial deterioration has been years in the making. Poor revenue collection, a shrinking rates base, and rising debt costs have steadily eaten into what Johannesburg can actually spend on services.

All of this is happening with 134 days to go until the 4 November local government elections.

The Democratic Alliance has named Helen Zille as its mayoral candidate for Johannesburg. Zille, a former mayor of Cape Town and premier of the Western Cape, has built her campaign around exactly this kind of failure. She has said that it would take more than five years to turn the city around and that fixing it would require a whole-of-society effort. She is not wrong about the scale of the problem. Whether Zille can solve it is a separate question, as she still has to win the election in November to even have a chance to try fix Johannesburg.

What the fuel suspension does is hand Zille’s campaign evidence that the city, under its current management, cannot manage its finances well enough to even buy fuel for its vehicles. That is the record Johannesburg's voters will be asked to assess.

Johannesburg's residents are being badly served because of bad management, over a long period, by people who have faced no consequences for it. November is when that either changes, or does not.