As Stephen Grootes says in “Head and shoulders above – Cape Town’s success could become a key issue in 2024 elections,” (Daily Maverick, 30 January 2023) the “kitchen table issues” of local government are becoming an increasingly important factor for voters in national government elections.

I couldn’t agree more. It is at the coal face of service delivery, at street level, that governments have nowhere to hide. It is here that citizens get to see the good, the bad and the ugly in crystal clarity.

While large parts of South Africa face widespread service delivery collapse, Cape Town is bucking this trend. Grootes mentions many new investments flowing into the city, big construction projects, and great feedback about the council’s swift response to reported faults.

He also points out that Capetonians already suffer fewer rolling blackouts than the rest of South Africa, and that this gap will get even bigger in future thanks to steps taken to augment electricity supply from non-Eskom sources, including our new effort to buy excess self-generated power from households and businesses.

This is a critical part of Cape Town’s future planning. We are on track to protect residents from the first four stages of load-shedding, and eventually to end rolling blackouts completely.

The provision of electricity is not the only space in which the City of Cape Town is fighting to take on duties beyond its mandate in local government. There are two other areas in which we are currently advocating for a devolution of power and responsibility from national government to the City of Cape Town in order to better protect and serve residents here.

One of these is policing where, together with the Western Cape Provincial Government, we have been steadily augmenting the under-resourced SAPS numbers with officers trained through our Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (Leap) programme. The other is taking over the running of the city’s passenger rail service, Metrorail.

Evidence around the world suggests that capable local governments that are close to communities and understand the complexity of the local challenges are best placed to solve those challenges.

Grootes also correctly raises the subject of Cape Town’s spatial and social inequality, and how people in different parts of the Metro might have very different perceptions of their local government. He touches on issues such as the high murder rate in a place like Khayelitsha, as well as homelessness in the city.

These are concerns that I share. We dare not shy away from the fact that, almost 30 years into our democracy, apartheid’s bitter legacy still scars cities across the country. Spatially, socially and economically South Africa remains a deeply unequal society, and Cape Town is no exception. It is my mission as mayor to use my time in office to chip away at as much of that legacy as I can.

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When I campaigned for mayor in 2021, I said that Cape Town should be a “City of Hope” for all, and particularly the poorest residents. The only way to tangibly bring hope to all is by directing the bulk of the City’s efforts, time, investment, budget and care towards areas where poverty still defines and circumscribes life chances for so many people.

These are also the parts of the city where infrastructure investment has not kept pace with urbanisation and density. You can see it in blocked sewers and strained pump stations in townships across Cape Town.

That’s why, on my very first day in office, I went to Khayelitsha to inspect sewer infrastructure. And this is why ever since then our government has been so obsessed with massive new sewer infrastructure investment — precisely because this is so closely connected with better dignity for our poorest residents.

With good governance and a sound financial position, including a clean audit for 2021/22 from the Auditor-General, we can afford to be bold in accelerating infrastructure investment now.

A week and a half ago, I announced the most ambitious infrastructure plan ever undertaken in Cape Town — we’re going to spend R120-billion over the next 10 years to improve and expand the city’s infrastructure — particularly in the poorest parts of the city. And the bulk of this investment will be in water and sanitation infrastructure.

We are going to quadruple our annual sewer pipe replacement, double our annual water pipe replacement and there will be a seven-fold increase in the budget for sewer pump station upgrades. These projects have already started, and it has been truly thrilling (and fulfilling) to see the number of sewer blockages start to trend downwards for the first time.

The next three years will also see R3-billion spent on wastewater works at places like Potsdam, Zandvliet, Macassar and Athlone, as well as R860-million for sewer upgrades at Philippi, Cape Flats, Milnerton and Gordon’s Bay. And we have plans to deliver 300 million litres of water from new sources daily by 2030.

You cannot live a life of dignity without these services, and we have seen what happens elsewhere in South Africa when this infrastructure is allowed to fall into disrepair or does not keep up with expanding communities. That will not happen in Cape Town.

Our city is not perfect — far from it — but great strides have been made in the past decade-and-a-half to unstitch the legacy of apartheid and improve the lives of Cape Town’s poorest citizens.

Cape Town today offers the widest access to free water and sanitation as well as free basic electricity of all the metros in South Africa. Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain now consistently top the planning approvals charts for new developments, while the City and Western Cape Government deliver on major infrastructure projects to sustain this economic growth, including state-of-the-art hospitals, and the rollout of a multi-billion-rand, world-class MyCiti bus service link to Khayelitsha and Philippi.

No other city in South Africa has invested billions of rands in more policing resources for the most crime-ravaged areas. And, importantly, no other city offers more people a chance to escape poverty and dependency through the prospect of finding employment, with the lowest unemployment rate of all the metros.

I know full well that we still have a long way to go. But, project by project, community by community, we are working hard to build a city of hope in Cape Town, especially for our most vulnerable residents. DM