The City of Johannesburg has budgeted absolutely zero rands to rescue millions of historical building plans from the doomed Metro Centre, and the administration is now actively hiding its report on the crisis from public scrutiny. Despite the Mayor’s explicit commitment in this month’s State of the City Address to proceed with demolishing the building, the City’s planning archive – the legal foundation of every property asset in Johannesburg – is being left to face imminent destruction with no funded plan to move or digitise it.
Instead, in the budget passed just last week, the City found the money to fund a politically facilitated employee agreement (PFA) that National Treasury explicitly instructed it to scrap. The administration can find cash for political favors, but has sat on its hands for three years while the structural history of this City hangs in the balance.
This is not an oversight. It is a deliberate choice.
At yesterday’s Section 79 Development Planning oversight committee meeting, the Executive Director presented a report on the archive crisis. However, councillors were denied pre-meeting copies. When a digital copy was requested on the floor, MMC Eunice Mgcina and Speaker of Council Margaret Arnolds closed ranks, telling councillors they would have to wait a month.
A one-month wait for a report just presented in an oversight meeting is procedurally defenseless. The motivation is purely political: the administration is desperate to avoid scrutiny over what it knew, when it knew it, and why it chose inaction.
What are they hiding? At best, gross negligence. At worst, something far more sinister.
The DA demands:
- Immediate Release: The Executive Director’s report must be sent to all Section 79 committee members today, not in a month; and;
- Halt Demolition Plans: A binding commitment from the Mayor’s Office that no steps toward the demolition of the Metro Centre will proceed until the archive’s safety is secured and publicly verified.
Once millions of drawings are gone, they cannot be recovered. Every lost plan is a future property dispute, an erased heritage record, and an unverified approval. Joburg residents deserve to know if their administration has a plan to save this archive – or if it intends to bury the evidence of its own negligence under the rubble of the Metro Centre.