GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
29 June 2026
The City of Cape Town is making it progressively less affordable for ordinary residents to live here, by choice, while its own books show it doesn’t need to.
The cost of living in the DA-led City is rising faster than wages, faster than pensions, faster than grants and faster than small business revenue. This is good for property speculators and developers, but bad for the overwhelming majority of residents.
Delving into the detail of Cape Town’s 2026/27 Budget adopted today, behind the press releases, slogans, spin and mirrors, several deliberate obfuscations, omissions and unsupported “facts” emerge.
The DA’s claim that 75% of the City’s R7.12 billion infrastructure spend reaches the poor sounds great but is presented as a bald assertion with no evidence behind it.
It isn’t mentioned that 62.6% of this money comprises conditional grants from national and province. When you strip out those grants, over which the City has no discretion, the DA’s discretionary contribution to pro-poor infrastructure is a modest 37% – less than half the claimed 75! This 37% is the actual measure of the City’s commitment to address inequality and under-development, including an extreme housing shortage.
The City-Wide Cleaning Levy imposed on residents since 2025 is not funding any real, separate service. It is merely a means to extract more money from residents.
City-Wide Cleaning was not invented by the DA in 2025 – it is core Urban Waste Management work that the City has performed and paid for from general revenue for as long as it has existed. Giving a pre-existing service a new name and then billing residents for it as if it is a new cost, has zero integrity.
The free basic services ‘shortfall’ the DA used to justify higher rates is manufactured accounting fiction.
According to the City, its free basic services cost jumped from R2.7 billion to R5.4 billion in one year, while the number of households served grew by 1.5%. The reason for the jump, according to the budget, is a switch from tariff-based accounting to average-cost accounting. The shortfall is not about new services reaching new people; it’s an accounting methodology change for which the City is extracting an additional R437m from residents. Under the City’s prior accounting method, the cost of free basic services is R3.1 billion. This is more than covered in the equitable share received from national government. There is no real shortfall.
Cape Town is cash flush – it could have absorbed some costs but chose to tighten the screws of unaffordability.
Table A8 in the Budget shows R15.6 billion in cash and investments for 2026/27, and a R7.6 billion cash-backed solvency buffer — even after R5 billion a year in new borrowing. The current 2025/26 year shows an even larger buffer: R17.3 billion in cash, a R9.3 billion surplus. A City with this much liquidity did not need to redirect R869 million in cleaning costs onto property rates the moment a court order forced it to change tack and did not need to manufacture a R437 million ‘shortfall’ in free basic services funding to justify cross-subsidising rates further.
The true cost of borrowing must be revealed.
The ‘Wheel of Value’ graphic (Figure 4) is presented as a factual account of how every rand of rates revenue is spent. In the March draft, ‘Cost of borrowing to fund infrastructure investment’ was shown as 5 cents in every rand. In today’s budget, the same line is shown as 3 cents — a 40% cut, the single largest reduction to any category in the entire wheel. The real cost of borrowing did not fall between March and June.
The DA maths on housing obscures truth and is unsubstantiated.
Page 4 of the budget states: ‘Over R1,7 billion for City affordable rental units over the MTREF, including R270 million in capital upgrades, and R1 billion in maintenance and repairs.’ R270 million plus R1 billion is R1.27 billion. Not R1.7 billion. There is a R430 million gap, and no schedule anywhere in the budget – capital or operational – supports the R1 billion maintenance figure.
The DA’s flagship commitment to affordable rental housing, the one promise most directly relevant to whether ordinary Capetonians can afford a roof over their heads, is a number without a basis.
Affordability is a choice which City of Cape Town government keeps choosing against. A GOOD Mayor would:
- Fold City-Wide Cleaning back into Urban Waste Management’s ordinary operating budget, funded from general revenue as it always should have been;
- Reverse the manufactured Free Basic Services shortfall;
- Publish an accurate Wheel of Value graphic supported by real financial calculations;
- Deep dive the claimed R1.7 billion rental housing figure; and
- Publish ward-by-ward breakdowns of who actually benefits from the capital budget, with grant-funded and City-funded projects clearly separated, and the methodology behind any future pro-poor percentage claim disclosed in full.
*Brett Herron is the GOOD Party and RISE Mzansi’s mayoral candidate for Cape Town in LGE2026. Herron is a lawyer, urban environmental specialist, and public representative who presently serves in the Western Cape Legislature.
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