CAPE TOWN’S TAPS AND TOILET NUMBERS FLATTER TO DECEIVE

GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,

GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate

30 September 2026

Context is critical to any believable story.

If you didn’t know, for instance, that more than 400 000 Western Cape households are located in diabolical conditions in informal settlements, the vast majority in Cape Town, and that approximately 100 000 new residents migrate to Cape Town per year, you may be tempted to believe that the City’s announcement this week that it has delivered 815 taps and 6 505 toilets in 2025/26 is worth celebrating.

In reality, these self-reported numbers of taps and toilets are a tiny drop in the ocean – if the numbers are to be believed at all.

In July, the Public Protector issued a damning report finding the City guilty of failing in its constitutional obligations to provide basic services and misrepresenting service delivery to the SST Marikana informal settlement in Khayelitsha. Public Protector’s Report 12 of 2026/27 records that the City misinformed the Public Protector’s investigators that SST-Marikana in Khayelitsha had 143 water taps. Site inspections conducted twice found none of these taps – just a single, illegal, self-connected communal tap for a community of thousands… The best explanation the City could offer for its 143 taps claim was that its GIS infrastructure data “may not be 100% accurate” due to corrupted records from two prior financial years.

Last year’s Auditor-General report for 2024/25 lists taps to informal settlements among the key service delivery indicators the DA-run City did not achieve (706 against a target of 750) and records a complete miss on basic waste removal from informal settlements (reported at 0% against a 99% target). Separately, the Auditor-General identified “preventable material misstatements” in the basic services performance information submitted for audit, which management corrected only after the fact.

The Public Protector and Auditor-General reports together describe a pattern of City lying. What, then, to make of this week’s announcement? For a start, the City’s numbers don’t distinguish how many of the claimed 6 505 toilets it has delivered are new, and how many are replacements for broken communal facilities. In other words, how many of these toilets have featured in previous DA announcements about alleged service delivery?

Nor does the City speak to the scale of its backlog. Rather than acknowledge that it delivered zero taps and toilets to approximately 750 informal settlements, it wants people to focus on the “more than 100” settlements which allegedly did. (There are said to be 848 informal settlements in the Metro, alone.)

Priorities, priorities….

The R46 million allegedly spent delivering the 815 taps and 6 505 toilets amounts to roughly 0.9% of the R4.93 billion capital budget for Water and Sanitation in 2025/26 – or roughly 0.7% of the R6.69 billion the DA allocated to Safety and Security. With crime and gangsterism resurgent, the daily lived reality for millions of residents is a life without safety, water or sanitation.

Dignity is not a theoretical statistic; it is a human condition. There is no dignity for residents of SST Marikana when a trip to a tap or a toilet involves wading through standing sewage. Conditions on the ground don’t lie; DA politicians do.

Media Enquiries: media@forgood.org.za