GOOD Speech by Axolile Notywala ,
GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor
24 April 2025
*Note to Editors: This speech was delivered during today’s City of Cape Town Full Council Meeting
Speaker, Mayor and Councillors, it is a good morning for South Africans, as it seems like the proposed VAT increase will be withdrawn, thanks to all the political parties that showed maturity in engaging on this issue.
Sadly, it is not a good morning for Cape Town residents, as similar budget and revenue raising proposals continue being imposed unfairly on them by the Democratic Alliance.
I RISE today with the Councillors of the GOOD Party, to reject Cape Town’s 2024/25 adjustments budget. We are in this council to stop the suffering.
In our next council meeting, in May, we will be debating the 2025/26 draft budget currently out for comment. If the DA continues to govern with arrogance as they have on these budget issues, Cape Town residents will continue to suffer.
Speaker, you survived for now, a motion of no confidence last month because you continue to defend the hypocrisy and the lies from Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis and the DA when it comes to the Cape Town budget and other service delivery failures.
The GOOD Party, and in particular GOOD Councillor Anton Louw has on numerous occasions highlighted and spoken against the DA’s hypocrisy of speaking out against high rates and tariffs in Johannesburg and Tshwane, while introducing high rates and tariffs in Cape Town. The Mayor stood here in our last council meeting defending these illogical increases in Cape Town.
Some of us are starting to wonder if Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is using similar formulas used by Donald Trump and his team in calculating the absurd tariffs that will see Cape Town residents suffering.
The Mayor, and DA councillors have since 2021 governed with arrogance and ignored the cries of pensioners and ratepayers in places such as Mitchells Plain, Strand and Bonteheuwel and many others, by continuously voting for budgets that hit hard at the pockets of some of the most vulnerable in our society. The current proposed increases will hit hard at the pockets of Cape Town homeowners across the board. Will the DA listen?
Speaker, we will not sit here and be quiet while the Mayor lies in council and to the public for political expediency. The Mayor lied to us here in council last month. Cape Town’s infrastructure budget, which is the capital budget, is not bigger than the infrastructure budgets of all three Gauteng Metros. The total for the three metros in Gauteng is R42,6 billion, while Cape Town’s total is R39,7 billion. Speaker, lies really have short legs.
We are continuously told that infrastructure investment in Cape Town is targeted at low-income communities. In this adjustments budget, money is being moved from sanitation installations to water installations and the reason is extortion. Does this mean extortion happens only with toilet installations but not when installing taps in the same informal settlements?
We are all well aware of the challenges with extortion in Cape Town, but let us not scapegoat mismanagement and spending failures by using extortion as an excuse.
While we sit here, there is a protest about water and sanitation from the Qandu Qandu informal settlement in Khayelitsha because you have continually failed them and many others across Cape Town.
Year on year, poor communities, particularly those living in informal settlements, get close to nothing in terms of direct capital expenditure. My calculations for example, from this adjustments budget, show that out of the overall total 2024/25 capital water and sanitation budget for Cape Town, which is R4,7 billion, only 0,01% (or R45 million) is allocated directly to all informal settlements for water and sanitation. This is an anti-poor budget!
Councillors, take out your own calculators and do the maths.
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