GOOD Party Manifesto Launch
GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
*Note to Editor: This speech was delivered at the GOOD party’s City of Cape Town Manifesto Launch.
19 September 2026
In Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, London represents peace, order, safety and normality, while Paris represents chaos, disorder, abnormality – and revolution.
Critics of the work say that because Dickens was a novelist, not a historian, his chosen focus on mob violence and terror discounted the scale of oppression of working class people and the legitimacy of the French Revolution.
He didn’t, for example, see the need to mention that Paris (and France as a whole) were at the time regarded as the most economically unequal society in recorded human history.
In Cape Town, the suburbs, inner city and Atlantic Seaboard represent order and safety, with the Cape Flats symbolic of chaos, oppression, violence and disorder. Both of Dickens’ cities rolled into one city, which is today regarded among the most unequal cities on earth.
For the past 20 years, the people who have controlled every lever in this city have projected themselves as “liberals” in the mould of Helen Suzman and Alan Paton, while perpetuating the very same kind of violence that their alleged forefathers rejected.
Violence in all its forms: Economic violence, social violence, gender violence, the violence of environments with glass ceilings for young people, and the violence of exclusion, unjust choices and systemic, institutionalised neglect.
Everyday violence that refuses to acknowledge the true evil of apartheid, as Dickens couldn’t, and therefore the necessity for any form of redress.
And a mayor, who like Marie Antoinette, believes the answers to extreme crises of unaffordability, and social, economic and spatial separation, are to be found in eating cake and building security walls.
A city which for 20 years has effectively told the majority of its residents to sit down and wait.
That that their time has no value, their safety is negotiable, and their dignity is a line item easily deferred to next year’s budget..
“Don’t look at those parts of the City,” they say. “Look at the value of property and tourism in these parts… and our audit results”.
And to help you not to see “those parts” you no longer need bother to avert your eyes as you pass through because they’re building a wall on your way to the airport.
Ladies and gentlemen…
I don’t want to repeat history lessons you all know. Let’s just state the obvious, that historic injustices unresolved don’t just disappear. They reverberate until they have been looked in the eye and fixed.
The families of slaves in the US are today seeking compensation; and the surviving children of Gaza have receipts, as do children on the Cape Flats.
The two cities in Cape Town’s spatial design were engineered in response to the need to keep people of colour close enough to work to work in White homes and businesses, but far enough away to not matter. Surely that necessity has fallen away?
Surely, by now, communities’ pushed to the edge shouldn’t still be the same ones which must wait longest: for the ambulance, the home, the unblocked sewer, the repaired pipe.
None of this is by chance. It’s all choice. Choice repeated over and over, in every budget line, every complaint queue, every decision taken before residents are ever asked.
Rather than compete to make the most noise or the most outlandish statements, GOOD’s nine councillors have spent the past five years as the adults in the room, always seeking to be independent and constructive.
We have spent the past term weakening the Marie Antoinette regime from the inside… dragging the City to court over unlawful tariffs, and winning; and then cheering on the fight for spatial justice – all the way to the Constitutional Court, and winning.
Holding the line on accountability when it cost us to do so.
This Plan is how we finish the job, not as Kings and Queens but hand-in-hand with Cape Town’s people and its important civil society sector.
No excuses, no delays, no dependencies on other levels of government. Just, leverage wealth that already exists to extend the foundations of good service delivery to all areas, and build a more resilient, sustainable and just city.
Six pledges. An Affordable City. A Housed City. An Equitable City. A Safer City. A Trusted City. A Working City.
Each one names the problem without flinching, says what we’ll do, and says how we’ll pay for it, because a promise with no mechanism is just noise, and Capetonians don’t need more noise.
Six achievable objectives which together constitute an achievable plan.
An Affordable City. Too many households are one prepaid top-up away from crisis. So we expand the indigent register and means-tested rebates, such that what you pay tracks what you actually earn, not just what a formula says your property is worth.
We end the practice of landlords marking-up electricity they resell to tenants and backyarders; no more skimming a margin off somebody without other options through no fault of their own.
We stop the grossly unfair practice of recovering a landlord’s own arrears by deducting from a tenant’s prepaid electricity. And billing errors get fixed before they’re handed to a debt collector with interest stacked on top, not after.
Add to that free off-peak public transport, across an integrated public transport network of Metrorail, MyCiTi and Golden Arrow, and you’ve cut many household’s biggest monthly costs in the same stroke as cutting this city’s emissions. While contributing to reducing inequality and spatial dislocation…
A Housed City. We stop publishing land inventories, like an estate agent, and hoping a developer shows up with an offer. Where private delivery has stalled, the City builds, directly, on its own land.
Informal settlements get security of tenure, water, sanitation and electricity where people already live, on published timelines, not a promise about a relocation site an hour from anyone’s job.
An inclusionary housing policy with teeth means the development rights we hand out for free come back with a contribution to genuine, enforceable affordable units, not a box ticked on a planning application nobody follows up on.
Backyard dwellers get formal tenure protection, too; their security no longer dependent on the whim of a landlord.
An Equitable City. One standard, everywhere. A pothole gets fixed on the same binding turnaround time in Nyanga as it does in Camps Bay. A streetlight outage is repaired and measured the same way in every ward, published, not managed as an acceptable variance.
Emergency response times get tracked ward by ward and published, because right now this city’s real answer to who counts isn’t written in a policy document, it’s written in tar, in streetlight poles, in which way the sirens turn.
And we fix the Lifeline tariff itself: remove the tapering thresholds that currently punish large families sharing one meter, and extend it to backyarders and tenants, not just property owners.
A Safer City. We stop pretending more boots on the ground fixes what poverty and inequality drive.
We’ve tried the army. We have LEAP. Murder persists regardless. So instead: a Youth Recreation and Cohesion Fund that treats sport and mentorship not as amenities of the privileged but as core safety infrastructure…
… with a structured, respected alternative identity to the one a gang offers, run through partnerships with the civil society organisations who are already doing this work without adequate funding.
We professionalise and demilitarise law enforcement, put real resourcing behind GBV and femicide response… including funding community-led violence interrupters already doing this work. Because we know that the people best placed to de-escalate a conflict are the people who live inside it.
A Trusted City. Sub-Councils that can move an actual budget line, not just minutes. Ward Committees that become real oversight committees, with a direct reporting line the moment something looks like corruption.
We open the Municipal Public Accounts Committee and the Bid Adjudication Committee to the public, because sunlight remains the most reliable disinfectant against corruption. And a petitions process, because right now, this City doesn’t have one at all.
And we hold in-person council meetings because we are serious about transparency and know that the Covid pandemic is over.
A Working City. We bring outsourced City jobs; cleaning, security, maintenance, back in-house, with fair pay and real protections, and stop the City itself driving down wages through its own contracts.
We reinstate and expand the Women’s Road Repair Teams, giving women a direct route into skilled work usually reserved for men. We back cooperatives with fast-tracked registration and access to City tenders, not just corporates. And we support small-scale traders instead of raiding them.
I want you to sit with this one: In May this year, Hanover Park residents selling home-baked koeksisters and vetkoek were issued notices warning of a fine of up to R800 000, or imprisonment of up to twenty years, for a zoning contravention.
Thirteen years after this City’s own Informal Trading Policy promised support, mentorship, and market access… None of it delivered.
That is not enforcement. That is cruelty wearing a compliance uniform.
That’s the manifesto. Six pledges, and under every one of them, a list of specific, costed, named policies, not a mood board.
Now, I know you’ve have heard promises from political parties before. So we’ve added a tracking mechanism to keep everyone on the same page.
Every pledge in the manifesto is backed by a First 100 Days Delivery Plan. Not a vague commitment to “our first term” but a dated, department-owned plan that gets published on a public tracker before the ink on the election is dry.
This city has perfected the art of announce plans at press conferences only to bury them in committee minutes, never to be measured again. We built our tracker to be checked.
And the standard we’re setting for ourselves is simple: Day One means Day One. Not within our first term, not once a bill has been drafted, Day One. Every single flagship commitment in the plan is an instruction a Mayor and City Manager can issue on the very first working day in office, using powers they already have under existing law.
Our flagship Day One action is a moratorium on the sale of all public land and long leases over ten years, city-wide, effective immediately. Not a permanent freeze, a pause, with a published end-condition.
The moratorium lifts, parcel by parcel, only once an independent Land and Property Audit has checked that specific piece of land against the city’s housing backlog, its food-desert map, its youth and safety facility gaps – and Council has voted on what it should become.
Because for over a decade, valuable public land has been leaving public hands in backroom deals before anyone established the city’s actual needs.
Alongside the Day One mortarium we halt City-initiated evictions from council rental stock, we go into the next budget cycle with a mission to freeze rates increases above inflation until a budget overhaul has been conducted.
And we switch on the public tracker… every commitment in the plan, published, updated, checked, before our first formal report-back is even due.
Those are the foundations on which are six pledge rest.
A mechanism, a date, and a name attached to it.
So let me end with this.
A picture of Cape Town, 2046, that is entirely deliverable. Without the need for storming Civic Centre or deploying guillotines.
Everyone has a home in which they feel invested, not just four walls, a home. Getting around means the bus or the train; cars are no longer the default, and with them gone, so is the smog.
A child is playing in the park. It’s that golden hour of the afternoon when the heat breaks and parents let their kids run loose for one more hour before dinner. There’s a water fountain, and the water is drinkable.
There’s a public toilet nearby, clean and working. The ground beneath the swings is rubberised, because someone thought ahead. There’s no litter drifting across the grass. A parent can look away for a minute without their stomach dropping.
No, its not in Rondebosch. This park is in anywhere in our city under a GOOD Cape Town.
This is not an aspiration. It’s a promise attached to dates, responsibilities and a public tracker.
Our Tale of Two Cities is about a city that learns to become one.
A City built by residents, for residents, that builds on the benefits of its natural splendour to the benefit of all who live here.
A City in which the voices of people in this hall are not drowned out, but add to the voices of those who’ve never had to wait for a bus, a bill correction, or an ambulance. Who’ve never had to duck beneath their bedroom windows in the dead of night while the bullets fly.
So that we hear the full orchestra as those who wrote the Constitution wanted us to. Not rich or poor, or black or white, or suburb or squalor. One city for all.
Take the manifesto home, hold us to the tracker, and take charge of a more inclusive and affordable City.
Thank you.
Media Enquiries: media@forgood.org.za