Did you know that for well over a century previous Mayors of Cape Town would publish an annual “Mayoral Minute” at the end of each year to review the year gone by? No, neither did I – until I started doing background reading last year in preparing to run for Mayor myself. For some reason, these ‘Mayoral Minutes’ abruptly stopped in the late-1970s.
Until now. Welcome to the first ‘Mayoral Minute’ in a long time. I’m reviving the Mayoral Minute this year in the hope that it is a tradition protected by future Mayors too, and that these documents can serve as an important historical record for future generations of Capetonians.
When preparing to run for this office, I read as widely as I could. Most of this reading centred on policy documents like the City’s Integrated Development Plan, technical information about the City’s infrastructure and appraisals of its services offering, and its past and current budgets. It isn’t exactly light reading, but perusing these dense government documents was an important part of my preparation for the job.
Then I was given a book by a kind and elderly gardening enthusiast who I met in one of the City’s loveliest parks, the Arderne Gardens in Claremont.
The Chain Gang was authored by David Bloomberg, who wore the mayoral chain between 1973 and 1975. In it, he draws on the Mayoral Minutes and Cape Town newspaper archives to profile Cape Town’s past mayors and to get a feel for what was happening in the city in various eras.
The mayors featured in Bloomberg’s book are, for the most part, fascinating characters. Many of them played an important role in South Africa’s development, but also in Cape Town’s opposition to the prevailing political zeitgeist in the country. For most of its history, Cape Town has been home to a more liberal strand of politics that has stood in contrast to the various forms of nationalism that have prevailed elsewhere in South Africa. Its mayors often personified this political exceptionalism.
For example, Cape Town’s first woman mayor, Joyce Newton-Thompson (served 1959 – 1961), openly criticised other South African cities that enforced the racial segregation of children and the lack of seating for black attendees of public festivals. She also established South Africa’s first birth control clinic in Observatory, which was open to women of all races. Both actions stood in obvious contrast to the socially conservative and racist political disposition embedded elsewhere in the country.
There are also moments of levity in those Mayoral Minutes. William Charles Foster (1937 – 1939), for example, opened a public swimming pool by stripping off his suit pants and jacket to reveal a brightly-coloured pair of swimming trunks and jumping right in. In today’s world of social media, and in my state of fitness, I’m not sure I’d try anything similar!
The “return to normalcy” of the post-World War 1, post-Spanish flu period, documented in the 1920 Minute has parallels with our own emergence from the Covid-19 pandemic a century later. It shows why it is so important for us to document our history and learn the lessons from it – and why I am so keen to revive the Mayoral Minute tradition in Cape Town.
These Minutes, which are still stored in Cape Town’s archive, were simple notes drafted by mayors at the end of each year which, often with personal reflection, summarised the city government’s annual progress and the changes in its social, economic, and political context. This tradition went on for more than a century. For some reason, it was abandoned in the late 1970s, and replaced by bureaucratic documents such as annual reports.
This 2022 Mayoral Minute will, as is customary, describe my own understanding of Cape Town’s current situation, the thinking behind the policies our government has adopted to respond to this, and the progress we are making to improve the lives of all the people who live here.
Personal Reflections
The team that I lead has the profound responsibility of demonstrating that state failure (as is happening all over the country) is not inevitable and that, on the contrary, it is possible to run a capable government in South Africa. Our motivating ambition is for Cape Town to be regarded as a ‘City of Hope’ – a place where things work, and people can build a better life for themselves and their families. I regard it as an honour to be in this position, and I thank every resident for their ongoing faith and support. We will not always get it right. That we will err, and that we will try every day to do better, are the only two assurances I can make.
I can also report that, after just over a year in office, I am thoroughly and completely enjoying the job. It stands to reason that running one of the best cities in the world is one of the most fulfilling jobs in the world.
Over the course of the past year, I’ve tried to spend as much time outside of the Civic Centre as my schedule allows. I’m always surprised meeting leaders of businesses who hardly ever speak to their customers. I believe just like a shop manager must spend time on the shop floor, in the aisles, understanding the customer experience, so a mayor’s place is on the streets, talking to residents and hearing their feedback directly, rather than in offices, chambers and boardrooms.
It’s a great motivator for me, to speak to people about their experiences of life in our city and to hear about how they believe their lives could get better and finding out how we can help. My obsession with water infrastructure, for example, is galvanised by personally seeing far too many overflowing drains in townships, and meeting residents who live there.
I have also been greatly motivated by how willing Capetonians are to do the work required to build a better city. One of my pet peeves is seeing litter lying on the streets — it betrays the dire lack of concern of some for the well-being of others. With the goal of building a public culture of pride in our city, over the past twelve months we’ve held cleanups at parks, beaches, waterways, and other public spaces all over the city. These clean ups have been attended by thousands of Capetonians. In its latest iteration in October and November, residents helped to collect over 150 000 bags of litter.
The challenges in our city are immense and time passes quickly. It is deeply frustrating to see how slowly government business often takes and how regulations designed to deter maladministration can result in the delayed delivery of services that people urgently need to live dignified lives.
One year in, the mission remains clear: We are building a city in which all can experience the real hope of a future that is safer, cleaner, and more prosperous.
I now turn to the context we face and the progress we’ve made.
Cape Town in 2022
The social, economic, and political context in which the city government operates are characterised by high levels of poverty, unemployment, economic sluggishness, the enduring legacy of apartheid social planning, and extensive national political uncertainty. Underscoring these challenges are the impact of the worst power cuts in the history of the country with Eskom implementing record load-shedding for more than 200 days of the year.
The economy
Despite the fact that Cape Town has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, there is an unacceptable number of Capetonians living in poverty. Poverty does not only affect the poor; poverty affects everyone. This is because poverty is a contributing factor to almost every other social ill, from crime to drug use, from homelessness to family breakdown.
I believe that if we want to build a better future for ourselves and our children, we have to address the high levels of poverty in our society. The best way to do this — and to do it in a way that makes people sustainably better off while securing the dignity that arises from not being dependent on anyone else, especially the state — is to get people into work.
This in turn requires meaningfully faster economic growth. Growth means more jobs and higher wages over time. This growth – at a time when the national government is cash-strapped – must be led by the private sector. This does not mean that the state does not play a role, but the government’s role is to make it easy for the private sector to do business, thereby securing the conditions for economic growth.
Almost every policy and plan that our government in Cape Town has pursued this year has held economic growth and increased employment as guiding imperatives. Even policies that are seemingly not about poverty in fact are.
Crime
Tackling crime is one of our top priorities. Crime is both a cause and a result of low economic growth. Jobseekers and employees both pay a heavy economic price for living in an unsafe society. While violent crime is still far too prevalent in Cape Town, we are actively and successfully taking real steps to make people safer and the results are promising.
Energy
South Africa faces an energy crisis that is profoundly economically damaging. Eskom load-shedding costs Cape Town’s economy R75 million per stage, per day. This translates into tens of billions of Rands’ worth of value lost to the local economy each year. At the time of writing, Eskom was implementing Stage 5 load-shedding nationally, meaning that South Africans are without power for 7,5 hours a day, split into three separate 2,5-hour blocks of time.
Cape Town’s Steenbras hydroelectric facility has become a shining light in the fight against load-shedding. Thanks to years of excellent and ongoing maintenance and management, the facility is the best performing power station in the country today and can protect City customers from two stages of load-shedding some of the time, and one stage of load-shedding almost all of the time, safeguarding R150 million in value for each day of load-shedding. Unfortunately 2022’s regular Stage 3 and Stage 4 load-shedding (sometimes rising to Stage 5 and 6) means Cape Town still experiences significant economic damage, which comes at the cost of jobs. Ending load-shedding will be the biggest stimulus for the local economy, and this has been a central feature of our governance programme this year.
Infrastructure
I want to touch briefly on municipal infrastructure, which is the core mandate of a local government. Over the past few years, there has been an underinvestment in new infrastructure and in some areas maintenance backlogs have built up. This was especially prevalent during the drought of 2016 to 2018 and the more recent Covid-19 pandemic. Consequently, we have embarked on a plan to invest in infrastructure and perform maintenance on a scale unseen in decades. While we have a lot of work to do, I am confident that this plan will result in Cape Town’s having water/sanitation, waste processing, energy, and transport infrastructure that will prepare us for years of future growth and success. There can be no doubt that the availability of quality infrastructure in a municipality attracts investment and unleashes growth. Good infrastructure benefits the supply side of the economy, too, because new civil infrastructure projects are labour intensive and one of the most effective ways for the state to directly reduce unemployment.
Progress this year
The themes I identified in the previous section have formed the bulk of our governance agenda this year. On each of these themes, we have made significant progress.
Crime
In October, Judge Daniel Thulare of the Western Cape High Court expressed his opinion, in a judgment of the Court, that the South African Police Service in the province had been infiltrated by gangsters in its highest ranks. This, together with the general observation that SAPS is woefully failing to discharge its mandate to keep Capetonians safe, has led us to adopt the policy position that more policing power should be devolved to the city government. We have been actively lobbying the national government in this regard and working night and day to do what we can within our powers to make all our communities safer.
In August, we celebrated the deployment of 1 100 Law Enforcement Advancement Programme (LEAP) officers in a passing-out ceremony in Bishop Lavis. In collaboration with the Western Cape government, LEAP has seen law enforcement personnel deployed to the most crime-affected areas of the city, including Delft, Nyanga, Gugulethu, Philippi, and Hanover Park.
Quarterly crime statistics released in November showed encouraging signs that LEAP is working. For example, Philippi East has fallen off the list of the top 30 crime zones in the country. Over the twelve months between October 2021 and September of this year, Gugulethu saw a 30,6% decrease in its murder rate. Over the same period, Delft has seen a 17,4% decrease in murder, with the rate of contact crime also decreasing by 12,1% in the area.
We will continue to invest heavily in the LEAP programme in partnership with the provincial government.
In August, we deployed 100 new City law enforcement officers to the Central Business District, the city’s most important economic zone. These officers patrol the area 24 hours a day, ensuring the streets are safer and cleaner. As a result, businesses and their employees have reported feeling safer, suggesting increased business confidence in the area which not only benefits businesses with a presence there but is beneficial for the tourism industry, too.
In November, we launched a new Highway Patrol Unit to bolster visible policing on Cape Town’s busiest roads. Using high-tech monitoring and enforcement — including automatic numberplate recognition — the Highway Patrol will keep road users safer.
All over the world, police forces are embracing the use of technology to bolster their crime fighting capacity and increase their arrest rates. This year, Cape Town has pursued worldwide best practice by transforming its safety and security services with technology, including drones, manned aerial information gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance, improved data science capacity for more accurate planning and operations, and gunshot location technology.
Our Metro Police and Law Enforcement are ready to play a greater role in criminal investigations and in preparing dockets for prosecution. We are already doing more than ever before, but there is still a need for our officers to be explicitly empowered in law to investigate crime, proactively gather evidence and intelligence, and present prosecution-ready cases to the National Prosecuting Authority, instead of having to hand over cases to SAPS at an early stage. I believe devolution will have a greater effect on crime rates in Cape Town than any intervention the City is currently authorised to perform ever could.
Energy
We are also making progress on ending the power crisis in Cape Town. It cannot come soon enough with Eskom increasingly unable to provide an adequate electricity supply. This year, we launched several programmes to end load-shedding over time in Cape Town. We are on track to offer four stages of load-shedding protection by the end of the mayoral term of office in 2026. These projects could be significantly expedited through various regulatory interventions from the national government, bringing load-shedding to an end even sooner. If these interventions are made, we are ready to capitalise on them immediately.
Some of the work we have been doing on this front include:
- In February, we went to market to procure 300MW of energy from independent power producers. This procurement will deliver a more reliable and cheaper supply of electricity to Capetonians by 2025.
- We are in the final stages of preparing to procure dispatchable energy in early 2023. The City has developed a battery storage roadmap to investigate how this technology can most effectively be deployed in Cape Town.
- Every open rooftop in Cape Town is an opportunity to contribute to the City’s energy security. Recognising this, we introduced an important policy shift in July to allow the City to buy all excess electricity from businesses with on-site electricity generation installations. I believe this will encourage more people to install their own solar PV systems, which could become a significant source of power for the city. As well as contributing to the economic benefits of load-shedding mitigation, embedded generation will reduce lost productivity. The policy will be extended to residential generators in 2023.
Infrastructure
At the beginning of my term, I instituted several Mayoral Priority Programmes. These MPPs are focused on key service delivery areas including safety, housing, and energy. The relevant directorates report back on their progress on each programme’s objectives.
Three of the Mayoral Priority Programmes are specifically infrastructure-focused, namely the Sanitation and Inland Water Quality Programme, Energy Security for Economic Growth, and Land Release for Affordable Housing. I have already dealt with the second of these at some length.
Water and sanitation are our most immediate infrastructural priorities, because better sanitation is the beginning of greater dignity for the poorest residents, and because Cape Town remains vulnerable to drought. We have increased our investment in water and sewage infrastructure to R8 billion over three years and have quadrupled our sewer pipe replacement, and we are also investing in improved responsiveness to sewer spills.
We’re prioritising the replacement of pipes in some of the poorest areas of Cape Town, reducing the indignity that results from lack of access to clean water and safe sewage removal. This financial year, R109,4 million will be spent on replacing pipes in Kuyasa, Atlantis, Kraaifontein, Joe Slovo, Makhaza, Gugulethu and Philippi. We have begun upgrades to the Potsdam, Athlone, Zandvliet and Macassar wastewater plants to improve both their capacity and efficiency. We’ve also begun upgrades to many of the sewer pump stations across the city that are in poor condition.
Restoring the health of our waterways and vleis is also non-negotiable. In the coming years we aim to steadily close off the multiple sources of pollution to our critically affected waterbodies – including Milnerton Lagoon, where we are building up to the dredging and removal of sediment containing decades of urban pollution.
All of this investment will support the growth of Cape Town’s economy, ensuring that residents and businesses both have the water they need to flourish and avoid the indignity and disruption of sewer overflows. It will also limit future harm to our environmental assets like rivers, vleis, and lagoons.
As part of our water augmentation plans, the Berg River Voelvlei Augmentation Scheme was approved by Council in the year and will produce 40 million litres of water per day, helping to ensure future water security. We are determined not to face the same water shortages we experienced in the 2016-2018 drought.
When it comes to public transport, the N2 express MyCiTi service is up and running, and the expansion of services linking Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain with the Southern Suburbs is well under way. This will go a long way towards addressing the spatial separation that persists in our city and is the model of an efficient public transport system. We have begun the process of devolving control of passenger rail from national government to the City, which will allow a functional and affordable public transport system with trains as its backbone. We cannot function as a city with millions more people moving here in coming years if we do not have a properly functioning rail system.
We remain determined to see this process through to its successful end.
Housing
Just as we seek to protect our residents from violent crime, so too are we committed to delivering more affordable housing in Cape Town. Our goal is for all our residents to be able to enjoy the dignity of a home.
This year, we have started to release city-owned land for the development of affordable housing opportunities by the private sector at a drastically increased rate. In choosing tranches of land to be released for development, we have prioritised locations that will move residents closer to economic opportunities, addressing the exclusion that maintains as a result of apartheid spatial planning.
A total of 1 130 social housing units have been approved by Council since May. Because we believe no one should be a permanent tenant of the state, we have introduced a new “No Cost Transfer” programme, making it as easy as possible for tenants to become owners of their Council housing, without having to pay anything towards the transfer costs. Thousands of tenants are now eligible to become homeowners for the first time in their lives, at no cost.
Homelessness
We are making progress on plans to expand dignified transitional shelter to help more people off the streets in Cape Town. Living on the street is not safe and dignified for those living there, nor safe and dignified for the people living around them. Over the last year, we have shifted the City’s policy to care interventions designed to help the homeless off the streets, with the clear understanding that even if this offer of help is rebuffed, we must act to keep public spaces open, clean and safe for all Capetonians. Our city’s public spaces serve important economic and community needs, and no person has the right to reserve these spaces as exclusively theirs, while indefinitely refusing all offers of shelter and social assistance.
To expand dignified transitional shelter in Cape Town over the next three years, we’re looking to spend at least R142 million to increase the number of City-run Safe Spaces where these are most needed. This is on top of the City’s ongoing support to NGOs assisting the homeless, including grant-in-aid funding and support to expand shelters operating on municipal land.
A large proportion of Capetonians living in the public spaces suffer from mental afflictions, addiction, depression, psychosis, trauma, or familial abuse. This situation severely worsened due to the economic impact of the national Covid-19 lockdown.
That’s why, much like NGO-run shelters, the City’s Safe Spaces offer dignified transitional shelter, two meals per day and access to a range of care interventions, like social services, mental health care, addiction treatment, job placement, family reunification, help getting ID books – all of these care interventions are designed to reintegrate people into society and help them off streets on a sustainable basis.
We already have two expanded Safe Spaces in the CBD area totalling around 500 beds, and one in Bellville with around 200 beds. We are moving forward with urgent applications required for planning approvals for additional Safe Spaces to help more people off the streets. In cases where those unlawfully occupying public spaces consistently refuse all offers of social assistance, the City will seek the necessary court order, and ensure alternative accommodation at shelters or safe spaces has been offered, where this is just and equitable.
The City will be approaching the courts for similar orders for hotspots around the City, including the CBD in the New Year. These processes do take time, as the City needs to establish the social circumstances and identities of those unlawfully occupying public spaces, and ensure there is a record of social assistance having been offered as a first resort.
This is the only principled way forward on this issue, which allows us to protect the public spaces needed for social and economic development, while also showing care for people sleeping on the street.
Conclusion
Our first year is behind us. Now we look forward with great excitement and anticipation to the year ahead, because we know it brings still more opportunity for Cape Town to do more. Our mission is to grow this city’s economy faster, so we can get people out of poverty and into work. We want every South African to be optimistic about the future again and know that South Africa can work, because Cape Town is showing the way. As for me personally, well, when you love what you do, it isn’t work. I am committed and excited to do even more in the New Year.
It remains only a pleasure and privilege to work for you, the Cape Town public.
MAYORAL MINUTE BY MAYOR, GEORDIN HILL-LEWIS
