GOOD Speech by Siyabulela Mamkeli,
GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor
21 August 2025
Note to Editor: This speech was delivered during the Cape Town Council Meeting
Thandiwe lives in Khayelitsha. Every week, she spends nearly R500 – almost half her wages – just to travel to her job in Claremont. Half her income is gone before she’s even bought food for her family.
Why is this happening? Because our zonal fare system still punishes people for where apartheid forced them to live. The Group Areas Act pushed families far from jobs, and today our transport system makes them pay again, every single day, for that history.
This injustice means:
Young people are turning down jobs because they can’t afford the bus.
Parents are forced to choose between bus fare and bread.
Township businesses lose money that should be circulating locally.
Speaker, I also speak as a concerned public representative.
Warren Charles’s son is wheelchair-bound. He uses the City’s Dial-a-Ride service to get to school. Last week, Warren learned through the media – and later in a letter – that Dial-a-Ride scholar transport will be suspended from 8 September 2025.
For his family, this is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between a child accessing his constitutional right to education, or being shut out.
And cost and access are not the only problems. Recently, a blind woman was raped while trying to use public transport – a horrific reminder that the most vulnerable in our city face dangers that a caring government should work to prevent.
Colleagues, this is not just about transport. This is economic apartheid reloaded. We are still taxing the poor and the vulnerable for being displaced and for being different.
There are urgent fixes we must act on:
* Introduce flat fares on key routes such as Khayelitsha to the CBD.
* Redirect subsidies to low-income and vulnerable commuters.
* Reverse the City’s reckless plan to scale back Dial-a-Ride.
Speaker, stop making our people pay for apartheid’s map. Thandiwe should be saving for her grandchildren’s school fees. Warren Charles’s son should not lose his ride to school.
As historian Nomalanga Mkhize said: “We removed racial zones only to build economic ones.”
We cannot keep building those zones. Let’s end this injustice – today.
Thank you. Enkosi. Baie Dankie.
Media Enquiries: media@forgood.org.za