Why the DA’s claim of ‘best-run city’ is a lie

CAPE Town is my home. I was born here, raised and live here, and have spent three decades working in and with municipalities across South Africa, from Chief Director at the Western Cape Department of Provincial and Local Government during Project Consolidate, to Director of HRD at SALGA, to programme manager at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. Ihave sat in council chambers, walked flooded alleys in Khayelitsha, convened ward committees in Mitchells Plain, and trained councillors.

- FAIEZ JACOBS

FLOODED streets in New Rest, Gugulethu, left residents stranded after heavy rains overwhelmed the drainage system.

(AYANDA NDAMANE Independent Newspapers)

So I speak as both a son of this city and a professional who knows what good local government looks like. And I say this without hesitation: the DAs “best-run city” slogan is a lie.

The DA has perfected a myth that its governance in Cape Town is efficient, clean, and pro-poor. In reality, it has entrenched apartheid-era patterns of privilege and neglect. Budgetary choices, service delivery patterns, and spatial planning decisions consistently benefit affluent, predominantly still white suburbs while relegating Black African and Coloured communities on the Cape Flats to death traps, indignity, despair and decay.

This is not opinion. It is fact, borne out by the City’s own budget books, infrastructure allocations, and daily tragedies in our neighbourhoods. Cape Town is a city split in two: one polished for tourists and property investors, the other condemned to neglect.

There are more than 400 000 families on Cape Town's housing waiting list. Some, like Cheryl-Ann Smith, applied in 1993 and are still waiting. In Mitchells Plain alone, 15 000 people are on the list.

Yet the City’s 2024/25 budget allocates RO to well-located inner-city social housing in Woodstock, Salt River or the Foreshore despite court orders and the availability of public land. Instead, only R2.55 billion is channelled to peripheral townships like Blue Downs and Atlantis, far from jobs and schools. Apartheid spatial planning is not only alive, it is entrenched.