Johannesburg is the beating heart of the African continent—the financial engine that drives its growth. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
We are living in an age where the paradigms we know are reaching their end. Human history is once again approaching a great rupture—a moment filled with mortal threats and miraculous opportunities. Some nations see their models fall apart, while others will close gaps that once seemed destined to take decades.
“Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder,” wrote Arnold J. Toynbee, the British philosopher of history who studied the rise and fall of civilisations.
Civilisations do not collapse when someone destroys them; they collapse when they fail to adapt. Nowhere is this truth more urgent than in Johannesburg—Africa’s financial heart, a city of extraordinary potential standing at a pivotal moment in its history.
For 99% of human history, we lived in the Stone Age. Everything we regard as civilisation emerged in the final 1%. The catalyst for this acceleration was humanity’s most powerful invention: the city.
Cities became engines of innovation and density—places where ideas collided, trade expanded, and cultures were born, evolved, layered over time, and transmitted to future generations. Long before national identities existed, there were city identities. And today, cities still determine the fate of nations.
This is why the Globalisation and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network matters: it assesses cities as global actors, not as footnotes in national statistics.
Every few years, GaWC releases its World Cities Ranking—one of the clearest mirrors of global influence.
Unlike GDP or population rankings, GaWC measures connectivity: how cities shape global flows of finance, information, and decision-making. It is a map of relevance.
In the 2024 GaWC report, Johannesburg ranks as an Alpha– city, placing it among the world’s influential urban hubs—just below the Alpha, Alpha+, and Alpha++ tiers dominated by London, New York, and Singapore.
No African city matches Johannesburg’s combination of infrastructure, corporate depth, cultural gravity, and continental reach.
Its influence is not accidental—it was built on gold. The city’s very foundation is tied to one of the world’s most valuable resources. Johannesburg sits atop soil that has produced roughly 50% of all the gold ever mined, fuelling centuries of wealth creation, infrastructure development, and global financial connections. The legacy of mining transformed a remote outpost into Africa’s most highly developed city, shaping its economy, architecture, and corporate culture.
While gold built Johannesburg’s wealth, its mild and predictable climate keeps capital and investors rooted in the city—people might earn here but spend elsewhere, yet the city’s weather ensures they choose to stay.
A climate built for productivity
Johannesburg enjoys one of the most stable and mild climates of any major city on earth. Summers are warm but comfortable, winters are sunny and dry, and while seasonal changes are noticeable, they are entirely manageable and never halt daily life. It is not equatorial and monotonous—the climate has variation, yet it remains predictable and conducive to work and leisure.
Daylight is also consistent, with approximately eleven hours in winter and fourteen hours in summer, compared with Northern European cities, where winter days can average only eight hours and summer days extend to 16 hours. This balance of seasonal variation and predictability fuels productivity, supports healthier routines, and creates an environment perfectly suited to the rhythms of modern white-collar life.
Johannesburg is also one of the easiest cities in the world to be a foreigner. Unlike the old world—civilisations thousands of years old, where identities harden and xenophobia is rising—Johannesburg is a newborn city, barely a century and a half old. It has no ancestral hierarchy to protect and no rigid cultural memory to police. Here, you rarely encounter attitudes that make you feel like an outsider. Your beliefs, clothing, accent, or appearance are not grounds for discrimination. And this openness is not a rhetoric; it is lived.
The only real barrier is South Africa’s restrictive visa regime. Its policies treat every newcomer as a threat to limited job opportunities—a worldview completely out of sync with our era. It misses the simple truth: skilled individuals do not take from an economy; they grow it.
Hosting the world’s power
Johannesburg is the beating heart of the African continent—the financial engine that drives its growth. It is home to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, one of the world’s top 20, and supported by world-class infrastructure, exceptional medical expertise, and schools and universities with genuine global relevance.
Its restaurant culture rivals that of major international capitals, while its position as a continental logistics hub places it at the centre of Africa’s supply chain. Soon, it will stand on the world stage as host of the G20 Summit.
Life here is intense yet serene, chaotic yet easy-going, raw yet deeply organic, and no doubt colorful—Africa’s greatest man-made jungle. Yet amid all this energy, the city still lacks one indispensable ingredient: safety.
Johannesburg lives with a contradiction: a world-class economy and a fragile sense of security. People do not sleep peacefully in their own homes. Children cannot walk freely, even in daylight. Police stations look like bunkers—barrelled doors, barred windows—monuments to a broken trust.
The city is robbed every few seconds despite a landscape of electric fences, armed patrols, alarms, and private security companies on every corner. The people are resilient—but exhausted.
Crime is part of life in any major metropolis—you learn quickly which areas and hours carry higher risks, and you adjust accordingly. But you always feel safe once you return home.
London, for example, is the capital of mobile phone theft. Pickpocketing exists in virtually every major city and burglaries that occur when no one is home are also common urban problems.
But what is truly abnormal are armed home invasions—executed like bank heists, carried out directly in front of the victim, and happening with alarming frequency—not in remote locations, but in the residential districts of a modern city.
This represents a complete violation of the inviolability of the home, a principle that has been respected for thousands of years.
The resolution of the city’s theft problem and the revival of its economy are inseparable—they must be tackled simultaneously.
It is not possible to fix one and then the other. Once a positive environment takes root, momentum will build quickly.
What is required is a dual approach: measures that restore the city’s self-confidence while also dismantling the supply chain that fuels theft. And the key to this lies in border security. We know that a significant portion of stolen goods and vehicles leaves the country through its borders. Securing those borders is one of the most basic responsibilities of a sovereign state.
From Alpha– to Alpha+: What Johannesburg needs
For Johannesburg to rise in the global hierarchy, South Africa must deliver more than incremental improvements—it needs a bold, motivating new beginning, the kind of renewed momentum the city last felt when gold was first discovered.
This requires robust urban governance, stable power and transport systems, renewed infrastructure, predictable public services, and integrated metropolitan planning that treats the city as a single economic organism rather than a fragmented administrative map. A unified Gauteng metro—Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Tshwane—linked through smart mobility and coordinated development would position the region to rival some of the world’s most powerful city-regions.
Johannesburg is not just another South African city. It is a national priority—an economic organism with continental responsibilities. Governing Johannesburg and Ulundi (for an example) under identical frameworks is neither logical nor fair.
Johannesburg needs a special legal status, tailored to its scale and national impact.
The bold move is simple: consolidate all state functions in Johannesburg. South Africa’s three-capital arrangement was a political compromise born out of Anglo-Boer War diplomacy. Those conditions no longer exist, and the 21st century demands a new imagination. In fact, the shift need not happen all at once. The Judiciary and the Legislature can be relocated to Johannesburg immediately, while moving the administrative capital can form part of a longer-term national plan.
Johannesburg is, uniquely, the only major global city whose central business district operates like a ghost town despite possessing world-class infrastructure. Recentralising governance here would revive the inner city, reduce administrative duplication, generate significant state savings, and concentrate economic and political energy in a single, coherent hub—repositioning South Africa more strategically within Africa and the world. Cape Town would benefit as well, liberated to focus on sustainability, tourism, and innovation, while Johannesburg steps into its natural role as the true capital of African governance and growth.
The race against rising African giants
According to The Goldman Sach’s report Nigeria, Egypt and Ethiopia will be 5th, 7th and 17th biggest economies of the world in 2075. According to the future prediction, South Africa is not in the top 20. It is in 26th place. Sub-Saharan Africa is changing fast. Cities like Nairobi and Lagos are gaining momentum in global projections. Johannesburg’s leadership is no longer guaranteed.
But the future projections are always reversible.The GaWC 2024 report reminds us that cities are living organisms—rising, falling, and reinventing themselves through deliberate choices, never by accident.
Johannesburg now stands at the edge of such a reinvention: it can either slip into decline or ascend into a new era of continental leadership, and what happens next will define South Africa’s place in the world. As Archimedes declared, “Give me a lever and a fulcrum, and I will move the world,” and Johannesburg reveals that lever every day—at broken traffic lights where two or three beggars instinctively begin directing traffic and drivers obey, not because of uniforms but because of an unspoken social order.
This self-organising instinct, this ability to solve problems under pressure, is the city’s greatest untapped asset.
Let me state the argument with the help of the popular motto of recent days: we can make Johannesburg great again—together. Johannesburg must rise, because when Johannesburg rises, the nation rises with it.