Members for life — The capture of Cape Town’s planning tribunal

Excisions and additions

On page 46 of the Government Gazette of 5 August 2013, directly beneath a bold sub-header that describes what the new section will be addressing, there is a statement that leaves zero room for interpretation.

“The term of office of members of a Municipal Planning Tribunal is five years or such shorter period as the Municipal Council may determine,” it notes, “provided that a member may not serve as a member for a continuous period of 10 years.”

The statement, which comprises section 37(1) of the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act of 2013, otherwise known as Spluma, is intended, by its very nature, to safeguard the independence of municipal planning tribunals (MPTs) across the country.

As the drafters of the legislation were well aware, given the commercial influence that MPTs can typically wield, such independence is critical to the clean and transparent functioning of local governments. In a booming property market such as Cape Town’s, where the MPT decides on all category 1 land-use applications — rezonings, subdivisions, permanent departures, removal of restrictive title deed conditions — it has the power to more than quadruple a property’s value.

On 30 June 2025, according to the precepts of Spluma, the term of office of the chair of the City of Cape Town’s MPT, David Daniels, hit its statutory ceiling. Daily Maverick’s reporting (as well as his own LinkedIn page) showed that Daniels had taken office on 1 July 2015, the same date that Spluma came into formal operation nationwide.

But on 26 June 2025, four days before Daniels was due to vacate his seat, the Cape Town municipal council adopted its latest Municipal Planning Amendment By-Law. As the text of the Western Cape Provincial Gazette of 8 August 2025 made clear (see page 2), the by-law was scheduled to come into operation on 1 October 2025, “except for section 116”, which was earmarked for commencement on the date of proclamation — in other words, section 116 would become operational almost two months before the remaining sections, which, at just shy of 200 sections in total, ran to more than 250 pages of provincial gazette content.

So what did section 116 say?

On page 82 of the aforementioned Western Cape Provincial Gazette, you would have noticed that the text includes “track changes” — an editorial function that shows all prior excisions and additions. Here, in sections 116(1) and 116(3) of the newly amended by-law, you would have seen that references to section 37(1) of Spluma — the supposedly authoritative national legislation — had simply been deleted. Similarly, in section 116(4), you would have observed that the original sentence had qualified the five-year term for MPT members as “renewable once”, but that at some point the pivotal “once” had been deleted.

The final two clauses of section 116, as you would also have seen, had been added from scratch: 116(5), which gave the municipal council the power to “reappoint” MPT members, and 116(6), which deemed a “reappointment that takes effect one month or more after a member’s term of office expires” as “non-continuous with the previous membership”. Put in plain English, a member’s term of office expires, the powers-that-be wait one month, and then they reappoint them for another 10 years. Rinse, wash, repeat; the effect created is the opposite of what the drafters of Spluma intended.

Two further editions of the Western Cape Provincial Gazette would have completed the picture for you: the edition of 13 June 2025 (page 427), where Pierre Smit was named MPT chairperson for a five-year term commencing on 1 July 2025; and the edition of 7 November 2025 (page 839), where Daniels was reinstated as chairperson for a third term.

So Smit, without any formal explanation – or at least none that could be found in the public record – was demoted to an ordinary member of the MPT after just four months as chair. As Daily Maverick read the situation, whatever the full story behind Smit’s fate, there were now some pressing questions to be asked of the council’s leadership.

For starters, given that Geordin Hill-Lewis, Cape Town’s executive mayor, had framed the Municipal Planning Amendment By-Law as the long-awaited fulfilment of his promise of affordable housing – “the future of housing delivery,” he assured the council in his speech of 26 June 2025, “is about enabling and assisting the private sector to meet housing market needs at scale” – how much did he know about section 116 and what did he personally approve?

Second, given that Cape Town’s deputy mayor, Eddie Andrews, was also the mayoral committee member for spatial planning and environment – and therefore the ultimate line-boss on the minutiae of the by-law – why did he too neglect to mention section 116 in his own relatively detailed speech?

After all, according to Daily Maverick’s reporting, Hill-Lewis and Andrews had been informed multiple times about the alleged procedural improprieties of the MPT.

No accountability for the judge

“That’s a major, major breakthrough for the economy of the Western Cape and for the brand of Cape Town,” said Daniels. “I think it’s a big deal.”

These words, spoken by the MPT chair in September 2020, were a reference to the fact that Amazon, the giant multinational corporation, had just been secured as an anchor tenant by Liesbeek Leisure Properties Trust, the company behind the R4,5-billion mega-development on the so-called River Club land in Observatory.

As reported by GroundUp on 22 September 2020, the Cape Town MPT had granted the go-ahead for the rezoning of River Club — from “open space” to “business” — less than a week before, despite a total of 180 objections from civil society bodies, activist organisations, First Nation groupings and individuals.

At the time, according to GroundUp, the chairperson of the Observatory Civic Association (OCA), Leslie London, had noted “a number of issues which brought ‘procedural justice’ into question”.

London, a respected public health academic (since retired) at the University of Cape Town, had characterised the improprieties as “bizarre” — as it turned out, by the MPT’s own admission, it had not considered the comprehensive objections of either Heritage Western Cape or the City of Cape Town’s environmental management department.

The OCA and a First Nation council, relying on funds raised from residents and ratepayers, would therefore challenge the decision in the Western Cape Division of the High Court. On 18 March 2022, Deputy Judge President Patricia Goliath would grant an order halting construction at the site, to allow for – in the words of her judgment – the “[conclusion] of meaningful engagement and consultation with all affected First Nations Peoples”.

But the developer would counter-sue – and, on 16 May 2023, by issuing a cost order against the OCA and the First Nation council, the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) would pave the way for construction to begin in earnest. As reported two days later, the SCA’s decision was bolstered by the fact that members of the indigenous council had turned on each other, with one side supporting its chosen leader and the other rejecting him “as a fraud”.

And yet the City of Cape Town, despite the fact that the River Club land remained an uncontested site of original colonial dispossession, was significantly less conflicted. Soon after lauding the final victory for Liesbeek Leisure Properties Trust, Deputy Mayor Andrews would condemn the objectors in unmistakable terms.

“The OCA’s damage extends beyond the River Club,” Andrews would note in an official statement released on 19 May 2023. “The litigation has harmed Cape Town’s global reputation as an investment destination, thereby costing us jobs and opportunities for economic recovery and alleviating poverty.”

Whether this was true or not, in the context of our current series on the MPT, Andrews appeared to be implicitly endorsing the statements made by Daniels back in 2020. Because, aside from informing GroundUp of his delight at the Amazon announcement, the MPT chair had also stated the following: “[With] the conservatism you see around us today I wonder if our environmentalists would ever have approved that wonderful restaurant at the tip of Cape Point that sits on the edge of a cliff, or that viewing deck we approved on the top of Table Mountain. You would struggle to get that approved now.”

Did this all suggest, then, that the DA-led municipal council and the Cape Town MPT, contrary to the precepts of Spluma, were somehow aligned on the policy of development-above-all-else? Did the relevant authorities take cognisance of the fact that the national legislation had been written with the tribunals’ independence as a core principle?

Daniels, like Hill-Lewis and Andrews, did not answer the questions that had been directly put to him on such issues. Instead, a centralised response from a City of Cape Town spokesperson was provided to Daily Maverick (see below).

What that meant in practice was that Daniels declined the opportunity to provide us background context on a speech he had delivered to the Western Cape Property Development Forum in May 2016, when he had been MPT chair for less than a year.

“It is a matter of concern that the objective of an involved citizenry has not been achieved in local government,” he had stated at the end of the address, before adding that “development practitioners [could] be assured of consistency, certainty and predictability in decision-making”.

As we would discover during the two-month-long stint of our reporting for this series, it wasn’t only Daily Maverick that had concerns about the institutional appropriateness of such an engagement.

In February 2022, while the OCA and the First Nation council were waiting for Judge Goliath’s ruling on the River Club development, David Ayres of the Greater Table View Action Forum (a registered non-profit) sent a nine-page letter replete with satellite photographs and maps to Hill-Lewis. The subject of the letter, which had been sent without response to Andrews, was the conduct of both the MPT chair and the MPT itself.

In the lead-up to the specific details of the complaint, Ayres referred to the speech given by Daniels in 2016.

“We note that the MPT chair must remain neutral and unbiased in what is a hearing between objectors and applicants (developers),” he wrote. “We have asked the question before, but why then did the current MPT chair appear as the keynote speaker at the Western Cape Property Development Forum’s third annual conference? To us this is similar to Judge Raymond Zondo taking up a keynote position at a SAA [South African Airways]annual conference prior to hearing evidence of State Capture at SAA.”

The only difference, Ayres continued, was that taxpayers had recourse against a judge, whereas in Cape Town there was no mechanism for ratepayers – who essentially funded the tribunal – to hold members of the MPT to account.

As Ayres informed Daily Maverick in May 2026, he had yet to receive a response from Hill-Lewis.

Who, when and why

“The cross references to section 37(1) were deleted from the by-law,” noted Luthando Tyhalibongo, “as the City is of the view that section 37(1) of the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act is an overreach into the constitutional competencies assigned to a municipality when adopting its planning by-law.”

As indicated above, Daily Maverick did not approach Tyhalibongo, the City of Cape Town’s spokesperson, for answers on the circumstances surrounding the removal of the term limit for MPT members. To be precise, aside from Hill-Lewis, Andrews and Daniels, our questions on the issue were sent directly to the City’s director of legal services, Riaana Sayed; its internal MPT administrator, Jaco van der Westhuizen; and one of its long-term legal advisers on the precepts and mechanisms of Spluma, Fiona Ogle.

What we sought to understand from these six individuals, at differing levels of insight, was who had made the decision to remove the term limit, when the decision had been made and, most importantly, why.

Tyhalibongo’s centralised response that section 37(1) of Spluma was, in the City’s estimation, an “overreach” into its “constitutional competencies” may have answered why the DA-led municipal council believed it was entitled to change a national law – but the same answer did not, by any stretch, extend into why it believed that such a change was necessary.

Neither did Tyhalibongo answer why the changes to section 116, which had obvious implications for the institutional independence of the MPT, had not been explained to voting or ratepaying Capetonians – not in the speeches of Hill-Lewis and Andrews on 26 June 2025, and not in the supplementary material that accompanied the amendments to the by-law.

In this last regard, at some point after its promulgation, an official document was published under the header “Additional information on the City of Cape Town Municipal Planning Amendment By-Law, 2025”. Across the full spread of its 19 pages, section 116 received fewer than 10 words – in paragraph 3.1, where all that was stated was that it came into effect on 8 August 2025.

But the question, of course, hadn’t changed – why did the enactment of section 116 get the jump on the dozens of sections by which it was surrounded? Once again, no answer was forthcoming. Instead, the document went on to explain many other things, including the new definition of a stoep (which now includes a wooden deck), the new definition of a boarding house, and new façade height measurements for Camps Bay and Bakoven.

The inescapable conclusion, then, was that the City of Cape Town was uninterested in answering a single substantive why about section 116. And as for the who, Daily Maverick did not fare much better.

“The City’s legal services department, with the assistance of external legal representatives, drafted the language of section 116 of the 2025 Municipal Planning Amendment By-Law,” Tyhalibongo informed us. “The City received advice that is legally privileged in this regard, save to confirm the by-law reflects the advice we have received.”

The matter of when, presumably, was also covered by legal privilege. Throughout the combined total of 28 questions on section 116 that Daily Maverick sent across the six right-of-reply letters, the issue of timing was a fundamental thread. But here, in the face of the same non-responses, we had a lot more to work with.

As a starting point, the original text of section 116 had been published in the Western Cape Provincial Gazette of 29 June 2015. In this first version of the by-law, as outlined above, section 37(1) of Spluma was fully intact, meaning that the term-limit for MPT members was “five years” and “renewable once” – also, there was no power of “reappointment” conferred on the municipal council.

Through the numerous amendments that followed, right up until 2025, section 116 retained its original shape. As testimony to this fact, in February 2021, when the City of Cape Town advertised for new external members, there was no ambiguity about the upper ceiling on successful candidates. “Their full term may not exceed 10 years,” the call for applications stated.

And so the answer to the question of when the unidentified officials in the City of Cape Town’s upper echelons took the decision to drop the national legislation that limited the terms of MPT members was, by our reckoning, self-evident – when they realised that the MPT’s longstanding members were about to leave.

Among the documents that Daily Maverick obtained from sources for this three-part investigative series was an email exchange between Van der Westhuizen, the above-mentioned MPT administrator in the spatial planning and environment directorate, and a senior representative of the Constantia Ratepayers and Residents Association. The full context of the exchange will be provided in part 2 of the series, where we will further interrogate the consequences of the hidden aspects of the MPT’s operations, but for now a specific email – sent by Van der Westhuizen on 30 March 2026 – is highly relevant.

“Most of them have also served more than 10 years as a member of the MPT,” Van der Westhuizen wrote, referring to the tribunal’s current complement of 23 members.

By Daily Maverick’s reading, what Van der Westhuizen was implicitly admitting with these words was that the City of Cape Town – in its own internal structures – had entirely normalised the situation. It wasn’t just about Daniels; it was about the tribunal itself. In the new version of section 116, MPT members could effectively serve for life.

And only the DA-led municipal council had the power to make that happen. DM