GOOD Statement by Anton Louw,
GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor
29 April 2025
The GOOD Party calls on the City of Cape Town to extend the public comment period of the City’s draft Budget, which is set to conclude on Friday 2 May. In a last-ditch attempt to soften public backlash, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced that the City is “looking at additional support to owners of properties up to R7 million.” This eleventh-hour move only highlights the uncertainty and instability within the budget and underscores the need for extended public scrutiny.
GOOD is urging Cape Town residents not to be bamboozled by the City’s creative budgeting, misleading PR spin, and phony redistribution promises.
Through this budget, the City of Cape Town is pretending to be Robin Hood. Wanting residents to believe the draft budget has the welfare of the poor at heart but it is actually just spin camouflaging the fact that the City wants to charge ratepayers a new set of tariffs that dwarf inflation. Unlike the legendary outlaw, who robbed the rich to help the poor, the Cape Town budget fleeces both rich and working-class households without making meaningful improvements to services or expanding support for Cape Town’s most vulnerable residents.
While the GOOD Party supports the principle of a redistributive budget, in which people living in suburbs like Newlands and Camps Bay cross-subsidise the improvement of services and social conditions on the Cape Flats, for example, this budget reveals no such noble intentions.
It is, instead, a fundamentally dishonest exercise in smoke and mirrors, backed by slick City PR machinery, to create the pretence of value for money for ratepayers while in fact all that’s happening is that tariffs are being shifted around, and they are being asked to pay steep increases.
- Electricity Tariffs: The City is spinning the electricity tariff adjustment as a benefit to consumers, but it merely corrects two years of unlawful overcharging above the regulator’s guidelines.
- Cleaning Levy U-Turn: The reversal of the so-called “affordable and fair” cleaning levy proves it was flawed from the start. This service was already funded via property rates, yet there’s no corresponding decrease in rates, just a repackaged fee to recoup losses from the electricity tariff revision.
- Lack of Support for the Poor: Despite claims of redistribution, the budget reflects no actual increase in expenditure in poorer communities and no additional support for indigent households, this, while total charges continue to rise sharply.
- Unrealistic Property Value Comparisons: Comparing property values across metros is disingenuous. Cape Town’s inflated property market means many residents are being taxed on valuations that far exceed their actual incomes.
The GOOD Party calls on Cape Town residents to see this budget for what it is, anti-poor and anti-working-class and demand transparency, fairness, and fiscal responsibility.
Media enquiries: media@forgood.org.za