The world's economic titans will descend upon Johannesburg, South Africa's gleaming financial engine, for the G20 Summit. Motorcades will glide through manicured corridors, delegates will sip imported wine in fortified venues, and President Cyril Ramaphosa will tout the nation's resilience. Yet just kilometres away, in the city's decaying heart, another reality festers: 102 abandoned buildings turned into vertical slums, choked with sewage, ruled by gangs, and lit by the blue flame of portable gas stoves. This is not a forgotten corner. This is the inner city, the historic nucleus of Johannesburg, now a monument to institutional collapse. The irony is suffocating: The G20 convenes to solve global crises while the host city cannot solve its own.

This is Johannesburg's open wound, raw, infected, and deliberately ignored. And the summit is not a backdrop. It is a mirror.

MBV1: A Microcosm of Municipal Failure

Walk into MBV1 in Joubert Park and the stench hits first, human waste, rotting garbage, and the acrid bite of nyaope drug smoke. Nelson Khetani has lived here since 2008, in what was meant to be temporary housing. The communal kitchens are gutted, copper pipes long stolen. The laundry room is a swamp of faeces. "There's guns, there's drugs, there's prostitutes, there's everything," he says.

The building is hijacked, not by metaphor, but by syndicate. Criminals evict legal tenants, install their own "landlords," and collect rent in cash. The real business? Drug labs. "They cook nyaop neat," says Joseph, a former hijacker turned whistle-blower. "That's the main business." The drug, laced with heroin, ARVs, and rat poison, kills slowly, but the buildings kill faster. Two years ago, a fire in a similar derelict tower claimed 76 lives. Nothing changed.

Vannin Court: Where the City Weaponises Neglect

At Vannin Court, owned by the city council, the decay is state-sanctioned. Residents say the municipality cut off water and electricity as punishment for the crime spilling from the building. "They were angry," says Sinethemba Maqoma. "So they took the water."

No water. No power. No fire safety. Residents cook on gas canisters in rooms with no ventilation. Toilets are flushed with buckets. Sewage floods the basement, submerging abandoned cars in a slow-moving river of waste. The city's response? Silence. The council declined to comment.

This is not incompetence. This is policy by abandonment.

The Hijacking Economy: Corruption as Infrastructure

Joseph's confession is chilling: "You can't hijack a building without a relationship with the city council and police. It's a matter of cash." Bribes buy impunity. Eviction orders are ignored. Police look away. The city's deputy director of communications claims there are "no credible reports" of wrongdoing.

But the evidence is in the stairwells: piles of rubbish, overflowing sewage, and the skeletal remains of municipal authority.

The Legal Trap: Eviction Without Alternatives

South Africa's constitution guarantees the right to housing. The Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act demands court orders and alternative accommodation. Sheriff Marks Mangaba is blunt: "Large-scale evictions cost millions of rands. We can't do it."

The result? Paralysis.

Landlords abandon buildings rather than pay rates.

Criminals move in.

The city lacks funds to evict or rehouse.

Residents are trapped in squalor.

Ramaphosa's March plea to "turn hijacked buildings into dignified homes" rings hollow when the city cannot even provide water to its own properties.

The G20 Facade: A City Dressed for a Funeral

Mayor Dada Morero insists Johannesburg is "ready to host the G20." The inner city has been "targeted for systemic removal of lawlessness," claims the council. But the BBC found no visible clean-up. No water restored. No buildings reclaimed. Just press releases.

The summit route will be sanitised, barricades, snipers, floral arrangements. But the stench of Vannin Court will still drift on the wind. The delegates will not see MBV1. They will not smell the sewage. They will not meet Joseph, haunted by the ghosts of the missing.

The Deeper Decay: From Apartheid's End to Municipal Collapse

This did not begin with hijackings. It began in 1994, when apartheid ended and Black South Africans flooded the city centre for jobs. Landlords fled. Maintenance stopped. Buildings were redlined. The state failed to build housing. The market failed to regulate itself.

Thirty years later, the inner city is a post-apartheid dystopia, not of racial segregation, but of class abandonment. The poor are warehoused in vertical tombs. The middle class fled to Sandton. The elite host G20 galas.

The Reckoning: A City That Cannot Host Itself

Johannesburg is not just hosting the G20. It is exposing it.

G20 Theme	Johannesburg Reality
Inclusive Growth	102 buildings unfit for human life
Sustainable Cities	Sewage in basements, no water
Global Cooperation	City cannot cooperate with itself

The summit will produce communiqués on urban resilience. Meanwhile, children play beside open sewers. The world will applaud South Africa's democracy. Meanwhile, its economic capital rots from within.

The Way Out — or the Way Down

Solutions exist, but they require political will the city lacks:

1.Emergency Housing Fund — Tax Sandton's skyscrapers to rehouse the inner city.

2.Anti-Corruption Task Force — Prosecute officials and police on the take.

3.Public-Private Redevelopment — Convert hijacked buildings into mixed-income housing with state subsidies.

4.Water and Power Restoration — Immediate, no excuses.

But none of this will happen. The cameras will focus on the venue. The decay will remain off-frame.

The Final Irony

The G20 meets to solve the world's problems. Johannesburg cannot solve its own.

The summit ends. The motorcades leave. The barricades come down. MBV1 still stands. Vannin Court still stinks. The drug labs still cook.

And the city, once the pride of Africa, continues its slow, shameful collapse. All while the world watches, applauds its wokenesss, and then looks away.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c993k9y2l4zo