Phantoms and forgeries: The cover-ups of Cape Town’s planning officers

To catch up on part 1 of this series, “Members for life — the capture of Cape Town’s planning tribunal”, click here. To catch-up on part 2 of this series, “Property information withheld — the Cape Town planning tribunal that answers to no one”, click here.

The double-explanation problem

On Friday, 28 June 2024, with the clock moving towards 6pm, Charles Rudman sent out an email with a remarkable admission.

“Just to let you know I have discovered that the engineering form for the property in Daniell Road has been forged,” he wrote.

Rudman, as his email signature made clear, was writing from the office of the executive deputy mayor and mayoral committee member for spatial planning and environment in the City of Cape Town – his direct boss, in other words, was Alderman Eddie Andrews.

The email was copied to the executive director of the spatial planning and environment directorate, Robert McGaffin. Its recipient was Garron Gsell, chairperson of the Tijgerhof Residents Association.

On its own merits, as Daily Maverick was informed, the confirmation of the forgery was no cause for alarm – such infringements were not unusual in a municipality as large and diffuse as Cape Town’s, and Andrews and McGaffin were simply where the buck stopped.

But then what, exactly, was remarkable about Rudman’s admission?

In our search for the most comprehensive answer to this question, Daily Maverick was supplied with a trove of documentary evidence that enabled us to track the story of 94 Daniell Road – a property that straddles the middle-income suburbs of Tijgerhof, Sanddrift and Milnerton – across a period of slightly more than five years, beginning in January 2021 and ending on 30 April 2026.

The story began with an order of the Western Cape Division of the High Court, granted by Justice Rosheni Allie in favour of the City of Cape Town on 28 January 2021.

The owners of the Daniell Road property, Justice Allie ruled, had erected structures that contravened the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act of 1977. As a result, her court order included a prohibition on letting out the premises until a land use application had been approved, following which administrative penalties could be settled and new building plans drawn up. If, on the other hand, the land use application was refused, the City of Cape Town was directed – in paragraph 11 of Justice Allie’s ruling – to approach the court for a demolition order.

The story now jumped to its second timeline, to 2 October 2025, when Mubesko Africa, a firm of forensic investigators, issued a 16-page report to Bouwe van der Eems, chairperson of the Milnerton Central Residents Association (MCRA) and Gsell’s friend and compatriot.

As the report verified, a land use application for 94 Daniell Road had been submitted and refused in June 2021. Although paragraph 11 of Justice Allie’s ruling had therefore been triggered, the firm could find no indication that the City of Cape Town had ever returned to court for a demolition order – on the contrary, site visits by Mubesko Africa in the first few months of 2025 established that the illegal buildings were still standing.

In this context, the forged engineering certificate became a core piece of evidence. In fact, as the Mubesko Africa report found, the certificate was now the very basis of its investigation into a relationship of “alleged corruption” between the draughtsman responsible (a name known to Daily Maverick) for the building plans at 94 Daniell Road and the spatial planning and environment department in the broader Blaauwberg district.

Still, obtaining a hard copy of the certificate was beginning to prove difficult. In his response to Mubesko Africa’s questions, the principal building inspector for the Blaauwberg district would say only that “no valid certificate” had yet been received. He suggested that the private investigators submit an application under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA).

But, for no good reason that the investigators or their client could glean, the PAIA application was knocked back. On the same date that his firm’s report was submitted to Van der Eems – again, 2 October 2025 – the managing director of Mubesko Africa sent a letter to the speaker of the Cape Town municipal council, Alderman Felicity Purchase.

“Our client… specifically denies that the [PAIA] application was frivolous or vexatious,” he wrote.

Elsewhere in the letter, Purchase was informed that Van der Eems would be appealing the decision himself, chiefly because the MCRA had now run out of funds to continue with the investigation.

Van der Eems, the paper trail showed, wasted no time in picking up the thread. Within weeks he received an email that contained encouraging news: Purchase, it transpired, had overturned the counter-appeal of a “third party” against the decision to release the certificate.

And here, for the final time, the story jumped forward again, to its third and most current timeline.

“At a viewing meeting on 10 April 2026, I was informed by Mr van der Eems that the records do not include the engineering certificate,” noted Jill Fabing, the deputy information officer for the City of Cape Town (as introduced to readers in part 2 of this series), in an affidavit deposed on 21 April 2026.

Nine days later, on 30 April 2026, after he had threatened to escalate the case to the information regulator, Fabing followed up with an email to Van der Eems.

She had been in touch with the “relevant line department”, Fabing wrote, and in the opinion of an official from the department, what Van der Eems was actually after was a “completion certificate” from a structural engineer.

“I am further informed,” Fabing continued, “that this type of form is only provided once all the work on the property has been completed and the structural engineer is satisfied with all structural components on site. According to the line department, the work has not yet been fully completed, therefore such a form cannot be provided.”

By Daily Maverick’s reckoning, then, this remained a story without an ending. As we understood it, the two explanations could not be true at once – either there was a forged engineering certificate that, for some reason, was being kept from Milnerton ratepayers, or there was a misunderstanding about the nature of the evidence they were chasing.

Delays, death threats and forebodings about building collapse

Out of the more than 60 right-of-reply questions that Daily Maverick sent to 15 recipients across the various structures and divisions of the Cape Town municipality, there was no issue, in the entirety of our three-part investigation, that received more attention than the case of 94 Daniell Road. Not only did Luthando Tyhalibongo, the City of Cape Town’s spokesperson, devote two sections to it in his centralised response, but it was the only issue that drew a coordinated reply from two of the senior staffers we approached.

Both Andrews and Purchase, it turned out, supported the explanation that Van der Eems and the MCRA were demanding sight of a document that did not yet exist. As the speaker of the house, Purchase, whose response included the full contents of Fabing’s email to Van der Eems of 30 April 2026 (as above), wanted us to know that, for her, this was “a perfectly reasonable and acceptable explanation”.

Andrews, for his part, repeated that “a valid completion certificate” could not “presently be issued” because work was still ongoing on-site. But more importantly, the deputy mayor acknowledged – in response to our question about the forgery confirmed by his aide – that “the details and signature” of the engineer “appeared to have been used fraudulently”.

Andrews did not explain why the evidence that proved the forgery had not been offered to Van der Eems, given that, irrespective of any completion certificate, this was clearly what the Milnerton ratepayers and their private investigators had been seeking.

As for our question about the action his office had taken after the discovery of the forgery, Andrews would write only this: “My office’s role was not to conduct a criminal or operational investigation itself, but to ensure that concerns raised were referred to the relevant officials for action in terms of the applicable law.”

The deputy mayor did not inform Daily Maverick of the identity of these “relevant officials”, nor did he expand any further on the “applicable law”.

And so, since Van der Eems and Gsell had spoken to us about the case in the context of the recent George building collapse, where local government negligence had resulted in 34 deaths – and regarding which the George municipality had been slammed for “evasive and obstructive behaviour” during the parliamentary investigation that followed – Daily Maverick was beginning to understand why they had taken matters into their own hands. As we were learning, the decision to hire private investigators on the 94 Daniell Road matter was just one aspect of a much larger picture – a picture that, for the residents and ratepayers of the Blaauwberg district, was characterised by consistent inaction on the part of the City of Cape Town.

Back on 6 May 2023, it so happened – a date, oddly enough, that was exactly one year before the disaster in George – the residents and ratepayers of Blaauwberg, led by Van der Eems and Gsell, had gathered on Corsair Road in Sanddrift. They chose this location because this was the address of an illegal boarding house whose owner had previously been fined R150,000 by the City of Cape Town’s municipal planning tribunal, but who was now seeking to legitimise his operation through the same municipal planning tribunal (MPT). Like 94 Daniell Road, which was literally around the corner, the residents were protesting against the possibility that the building could collapse at any time.

But more than that, they were protesting against how cases like these were devaluing their own properties. There were, in total, delegates from residents’ associations that represented eight suburbs in the district, from Brooklyn, Ysterplaat, Rugby and Milnerton, to Phoenix, Sanddrift, Summer Greens and Tijgerhof. Incorporated under the new banner of the United Residents Association (URA), the protest represented the grievances of about 40,000 Capetonians. On the day, a list of 160 rogue properties was handed to the deputy mayor, who had come out from the Civic Centre to hear the complaints.

Certain of the properties were linked to organised crime, the URA list claimed, and neighbours who lodged objections would occasionally receive death threats. The requested interventions therefore included an undertaking to begin issuing stop orders and land use management infringement notices, or, where necessary, to enforce demolition orders. The URA asked for the establishment of a task team, including law enforcement, to investigate.

Under the authority of Andrews, the task team was duly established – with apparently noble intentions, at least at the outset, it convened in July, September and November of 2023. But at the fourth meeting, on 11 April 2024, the URA leaders alleged that it was no more than a smokescreen.

A presentation, delivered at that meeting by Gsell, accused local government officials of “monetising inefficiencies through the MPT”. The specific mechanism, Gsell alleged, was the generation of revenue through the issuing of administrative penalties for contraventions. Slide 23 of the presentation asked whether the revenue from MPT penalties sat within a City budget line item, and, if so, whether there was an annual target to be met. Whatever the reason, the URA was insistent that the City of Cape Town harboured an in-built bias towards regularisation over enforcement.

Daily Maverick, for its part, sought more support for the argument. From among the dozens of cases on the URA’s books, an example that stood out was the matter of Milnerton Nissan, whose owners – according to Gsell – had also been allowed to continue operating despite a long history of serious infringements.

Our questions about Milnerton Nissan were sent to Linah Dube, the district head of the development management department for Blaauwberg.

“You signed the Milnerton Nissan MPT administrative penalty report submitted in winter 2025,” we put it to Dube, “recommending a penalty of R700,000 – made up of R100,000 per erf across seven properties – against a maximum of R15,450,000. The report you signed describes the conduct as wilful and grossly negligent across seven years and five months. What is the basis for recommending a penalty of 4.5% of the available maximum for conduct that your own report characterises in those terms?”

In other words, as the documents showed, the owners of Milnerton Nissan had steadily enlarged the property without obtaining the requisite land use approvals, thereby rendering themselves liable to a fine of more than R15-million. But the MPT, for reasons unknown, had issued a fine that was almost negligible by comparison.

Ghost demolitions and insider tip-offs

Dube did not respond to our right-of-reply questions – to reiterate, of the 15 City of Cape Town staffers we approached across the three parts of this series, only two (Andrews and Purchase) got back to us. The remainder were bundled into the consolidated response of the spokesperson, Tyhalibongo.

“The owners of the said dealership in Milnerton progressively assembled surrounding properties over a number of years and have incrementally, and unlawfully, extended the dealership operations beyond the originally approved site,” he confirmed.

Tyhalibongo did not provide any explanation as to why the MPT had chosen to issue a fine of less than 5% of the maximum, but he did note that, while an earlier administrative penalty of R63,000 had been settled, the R700,000 was “yet to be paid”. The City, he continued, was “awaiting a court date”.

Then he told us the following: “In addition, an impoundment process was undertaken with the aim of halting the unlawful construction activities. On Friday, 15 May 2026, the City’s development management department, together with law enforcement, visited the property to carry out the impoundment of building equipment. However, upon arrival, no construction activity was observed on site, and the equipment identified for impoundment had already been removed.”

For the City of Cape Town, the fact that there had been no further indication of unlawful construction was proof that the enforcement mechanisms were working. But for the URA, this raised suspicions that someone at Milnerton Nissan might have been tipped off.

Daily Maverick was sent WhatsApp messages shared among members of the Tijgerhof Residents Association the night before (Thursday, 14 May 2026) which began with a resident’s observation that at about 9pm there were “people shouting and walking around on the newly built deck wearing safety reflective aprons” but that, oddly, there were “no lights”.

Twenty minutes later, the same person posted to the WhatsApp group that the workers were “lifting something to the upper level”.

By the same token, the members of the URA strongly refuted the City of Cape Town’s official line on 94 Daniell Road. Beyond the issue of the forged engineering certificate, still unresolved at the time of this writing, there was Tyhalibongo’s final statement to us in his consolidated response, an underlined sentence that purported to undo most of our reporting on the matter.

“To date, most of the unauthorised works have been demolished,” it stated.

On four separate counts, Daily Maverick obtained evidence that this was not an accurate reflection of the facts.

First, there was the forensic report of Mubesko Africa from October 2025, which included a direct reference to the City’s inaction on Justice Allie’s ruling. “The decision to do ‘nothing’ as of the High Court order should be challenged through the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act principles,” the report noted on page 14.

Second and third, respectively, were the images by Daily Maverick’s photographer (as above) and the images forwarded by members of the URA, both taken in May 2026, which demonstrated that the main building was still standing and that occupants appeared to be living inside.

Finally, there was the email from a member of the Sanddrift Residents Association, sent to the principal building inspector of the Blaauwberg district and copied to the local ward councillor, of 24 May 2026.

“We acknowledge that the City requested removal of DB boards and electrical meters to prevent use of the property as a boarding house,” the resident, writing on behalf of her association, noted. “However, this does not address the fundamental safety risk posed by the unlawful structure. In its current state, the building should be demolished in terms of section 129 of the Municipal Planning By-Law, which empowers the City to order removal of illegal or unsafe structures.” DM