A six-month long community-led investigation by Daily Maverick and the community of Ward 58 in Johannesburg's inner city has revealed that the DA has failed on every metric of good local government.

Daily Maverick has spent six months tracking governance in Ward 58 and has worked with community activists to draw up this report. It reveals that while the DA has said that the ward will become a "demonstration ward" of how well it can govern, this promise has come to nought.

The party won the ward on a ticket of good governance and its manifesto for 2019 pivots on the same promise, but the experience of the communities of Fordsburg, Mayfair, Hursthill, Fietas and other areas reveals a very different experience.

By deploying a party cadre into the ward, the DA has taken the ward to the point of a local failed state after the ANC misgoverned it for years. The condition of the ward is so fragile that it is a time-bomb of 35 immigrant communities engaged in a low-level war with the local community.

Councillor Alex Christians has allegedly taken sides with a wealthy merchant foreign community and this has caused relationships to calcify in a community...