Last week, The Common Sense argued that Johannesburg is too large to govern effectively as a single municipality and should instead be broken into smaller, financially independent local governments with revenue-raising powers, while genuinely metropolitan functions remain coordinated across the wider city.

And the wheel does not have to be reinvented. Around the world, major cities are already governed along these lines.

Many of the world's largest and most successful cities do not ask one enormous municipality to manage every pothole, park, refuse collection route, and local development application across millions of residents. Instead, they divide government between a metropolitan authority responsible for services that genuinely need to operate across the whole city and smaller elected governments responsible for the everyday business of local government.

Very large cities still need one authority for problems that affect the whole metropolis. It makes more sense to manage major transport networks, strategic planning, and large infrastructure systems more broadly. But there is little reason why every neighbourhood service must therefore be controlled by the same authority.

The principle is subsidiarity. Government should sit at the lowest level capable of performing a function effectively, with powers moving upward only where scale genuinely demands it.

One example of a city where there is a broad overarching authority with a number of local authorities falling under it is London. It has a citywide mayor and Greater London Authority responsible for functions including transport, strategic planning, policing, and firefighting, while 32 local councils (called boroughs) handle much of the everyday business of local government, including refuse, housing, parking, and social care.

Tokyo follows a similar model. The metropolitan government runs services that benefit from operating at scale, including water, sewerage, and firefighting, while it has 23 local authorities (called special wards) that operate as autonomous local governments responsible for matters closer to residents.

Seoul has 25 autonomous districts, which function as basic local governments beneath the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Local authorities responsible for service delivery are therefore closer to the residents they serve.

A London borough serving a few hundred thousand people can concentrate on the roads, parks, refuse, housing, and planning problems within that area, while the metropolitan government concentrates on problems that genuinely require metropolitan scale.

Johannesburg instead asks one municipality serving millions of people to be both the government of the metropolis and the government of the neighbourhood. The same institution responsible for major infrastructure and citywide planning must also worry about the broken streetlight, overflowing rubbish, and neglected park.

Breaking Johannesburg up would separate those jobs.

It would also make accountability much clearer. If services collapsed in one part of Johannesburg, residents would know precisely which local government is responsible and could punish it at the ballot box. Successful municipalities would have an incentive to protect their revenue bases and provide better services, while failure in one part of the city would no longer necessarily mean failure across the entire metropolis.

Decentralisation would also introduce something Johannesburg currently has precious little of: competition and comparison within the city.

If Johannesburg consisted of several financially independent local governments, residents could see which administrations collected their revenue, maintained their roads, kept their streets clean, and approved development efficiently. Businesses deciding where to invest would have alternatives, successful municipalities could demonstrate what works, and badly governed municipalities would face pressure from voters and taxpayers.

Under one giant municipality, residents have no municipal alternative across the road.

There are, however, important exceptions to the decentralised model. New York, Toronto, and São Paulo are large cities that operate with one broad municipal authority.

Toronto was amalgamated from six municipalities into a “megacity” in 1998, but that amalgamation is still argued about by Toronto’s own urbanists as having weakened local responsiveness. Similarly, New York isn’t purely unified either – it has 59 community boards handling hyperlocal input, just without budget or executive authority.

The table below shows the governance model of selected global cities.

Critics will argue that breaking up Johannesburg into smaller municipalities will see the formation of some authorities with substantial tax bases, while there will be others that will be much poorer. The South African reality is that this is not feasible. Any proposal would see richer areas form municipalities with poorer areas. And in Johannesburg’s case, a clean rich/poor split isn’t really on the table – wealthy and poor suburbs sit next to each other closely enough that almost any sensible new boundary would pair them together. For example, it makes sense geographically for Sandton and Alexandra to fall under one municipality. Likewise, Killarney and the inner city would logically make sense in one municipality.

Furthermore, any broader citywide authority could help subsidise poorer areas – and this does not have to undercut the incentive for municipalities to compete and perform well. London and Tokyo already run exactly this combination. London boroughs keep most of the business rates they collect, but a share is redistributed between them through a system of tariffs and top-ups, so a borough with a weaker tax base is not simply left to sink. Tokyo does something similar: the metropolitan government collects a portion of ward-level taxes and redistributes them back under a fiscal adjustment formula, topping up wards with smaller tax bases while still leaving each ward to raise and manage its own revenue day to day. A Johannesburg version could work on the same principle – local municipalities keep real incentives to collect revenue efficiently and deliver services well, while a formal, rules-based transfer between wealthier and poorer areas stops the city from splitting into permanent winners and losers.

Breaking Johannesburg up into smaller municipalities may not be the silver bullet to save the city. But the current model’s record speaks for itself: nine mayors in eight years, a collapsing infrastructure network, and an inability to collect what is owed to the city. Whatever the right fix is, it isn’t more of the same.

(Note: Many similar challenges face cities and municipalities across South Africa, not just Johannesburg, and a broader rethink of municipal government in the country is needed.)