A body that decides who builds what across Cape Town – worth billions of rand a year – has quietly written itself free of term limits, withheld a legal opinion ratepayers paid for, and left a forged official document unexplained. Over three months, Daily Maverick investigated the Municipal Planning Tribunal. Here’s what Daily Maverick’s Kevin Bloom found.
Reporting by: Kevin Bloom
Filmed by: Joel Seboa
Edited by: Anda Tolibadi
Produced by: Emilie Gambade
Creative lead by: Malibongwe Tyilo
Sub-edited by: Kevin Flynn
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What does Amazon’s controversial R4.5 billion Cape Town mega-development, a Nissan Milnerton car dealership, and residential developments in Constantia and Blauwberg have to do with each other? Most importantly, what can they tell us about City of Cape Town governance? To answer those questions, we have to talk about Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal — the MPT.
What does Amazon’s controversial R4.5 billion Cape Town mega-development, a Nissan Milnerton car dealership, and residential developments in Constantia and Blauwberg have to do with each other? Most importantly, what can they tell us about City of Cape Town governance? To answer those questions, we have to talk about Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal — the MPT.
This is the powerful body, made up of 23 members, which decides who gets to build what, and where.
It rules on rezonings, subdivisions, and the removal of restrictive title deed conditions. In a booming property market, a single decision from this tribunal can more than quadruple the value of a piece of land.
I spent three months investigating how this tribunal actually works. What I found was a concerning pattern: officials serving well past their legal limits, information withheld from the ratepayers who fund the whole system, and, in at least one case, a forged official document that nobody in charge wanted to explain.
Members for life
National law is clear on this point. Under the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act — known as Spluma — members of a municipal planning tribunal may serve five years, renewable once. Ten years, maximum. No exceptions. The reason is simple: independence. You don’t want the same people making the same decisions, for the same developers, indefinitely.
Last year, on the 30th of June 2025, the chair of Cape Town’s MPT, David Daniels, hit that ceiling. He had held the position since 2015, the day the law came into force.
Four days before he was due to leave, the Cape Town municipal council passed an amendment to its planning by-law. Buried inside it was section 116. And section 116 quietly deleted every reference to the ten-year national limit. It deleted the single word “once” from the clause that had capped renewals. And it added something new: the power for the council to reappoint members indefinitely, provided there’s a gap of at least one month between terms.
In practice, that one-month gap resets the clock entirely. A member’s term ends, the city waits, and reappoints them for another ten years. Rinse and repeat.
Neither Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis nor Deputy Mayor Eddie Andrews mentioned this clause in their speeches to council on the day the by-law was passed. When we asked the city why the national term limit had been removed, we were told the national law was, in the city’s own words, an “overreach” into municipal authority. We were not told who made that decision, or when — the city said that information was legally privileged.
We do know this: days before Daniels’s term ended, a different member, Pierre Smit, was named incoming chair, effective the 1st of July. Four months later, without public explanation, Smit was out — and Daniels was reinstated, for a third term – that, up until a few months earlier, would have been a contravention of the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act.
An internal email from the city’s own MPT administrator, sent in March this year, put it plainly: most of the tribunal’s 23 members have already served more than ten years.
Now, this isn’t an abstract concern. Back in 2020, this same tribunal approved the rezoning of the River Club site in Observatory — from open space to business — clearing the way for Amazon’s African headquarters, despite 180 formal objections and despite admitting it hadn’t considered concerns raised by the city’s own heritage and environmental departments.
When residents and a First Nations council challenged the rezoning in court and briefly halted construction, the developer counter-sued. The objectors ultimately lost, and were ordered to pay costs.
One resident who had raised concerns about the process compared the tribunal chair’s conduct, appearing as keynote speaker at a property developers’ conference before hearing objections, to a judge addressing an industry event before ruling on a case involving that same industry. A residents’ organisation compared this to Judge Zondo chairing an SAA conference before hearing evidence of State Capture at SAA.
So the tribunal now shielded from term limits is the same tribunal that decided this.
Information withheld
Now if the tribunal can’t be limited by term, can it at least be scrutinised? We tried.
A Constantia ratepayer filed a formal request for the professional qualifications and affiliations of MPT members, basic information needed to judge whether members have conflicts of interest. The city’s answer: it doesn’t keep that information on record. At all.
We also followed the case of Tracey Davies, a Constantia ratepayer and former human rights lawyer who has formally objected to roughly a dozen subdivision applications in her suburb. Up until our series was published, she had never won a single case. Her argument is that Constantia’s protected character - large properties, mature gardens, tree canopy - is written into the city’s own planning scheme, and that restrictive title deed conditions are protected under the Constitution’s property rights. In her estimation, it was now being sold out to unscrupulous developers.
But the tribunal’s answer to every one of her objections rests on a single, unnamed senior counsel’s legal opinion, an opinion ratepayers themselves funded, and which the tribunal refused, for well over a year, to hand over. That opinion argues the city’s by-law overrides Spluma because of powers the city holds directly under the Constitution – the same argument used to justify scrapping the ten-year term limit I just talked about.
The city’s own legal adviser on this file, Fiona Ogle, attends every tribunal meeting for the Constantia district – the same meetings where her opinion is used to overrule objectors like Davies. When we asked whether that arrangement compromises the independence of the legal advice the tribunal receives, the city did not answer the question.
Forgeries and cover-ups
In Blaauwberg, on the other side of the city, roughly 40,000 ratepayers across eight suburbs have organised against what they describe as the council’s inaction on illegal buildings, inaction they say puts lives at risk.
Take 94 Daniell Road. In January 2021, a High Court judge ordered the city to seek a demolition order if a land-use application for the property was refused. It was refused, that same year. Five years later, the building was still standing, and, by the evidence we obtained, still occupied. Yet the City told me, in a formal right-of-reply, that the unauthorised works at this property had been demolished.
Central to the case is an engineering certificate. In mid-2024, an official working in the deputy mayor’s own office emailed colleagues to say the certificate had been forged. When residents tried to obtain a copy of it, they were first told, by the district’s principal building inspector, that no valid certificate had been received. Their formal access-to-information request was then turned down outright. When it was finally reopened on appeal, nearly a year later, they were told the city’s records simply don’t include the certificate – and then, right at the end of the process, that what they actually wanted was a different document, a “completion” certificate, which couldn’t yet be issued because the work wasn’t finished. These explanations don’t square with each other. The deputy mayor confirmed to us that the forgery was real: the engineer’s details and signature, he said, “appeared to have been used fraudulently.” He did not explain why that evidence was never disclosed to the residents who had been chasing it.
Nearby, a Milnerton Nissan dealership expanded onto neighbouring properties without permission for more than seven years, a conduct the city’s own report described as “wilful and grossly negligent.” The maximum fine available was over 15 million rand. The tribunal recommended a fine of R700,000, under five percent of that maximum. A fine that was almost negligible by comparison. The city’s spokesperson 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”.
He also told us that when the city eventually sent a team to impound construction equipment, no construction activity was observed on site, and the equipment 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 resident’s association, this raised suspicions that someone at Milnerton Nissan might have been tipped off.
Residents shared messages from the night before showing workers moving items in the dark, without lights. And remember here too the city’s claim to us – that “most of the unauthorised works” at Daniell Road have already been demolished – also does not match the evidence. Not the forensic report commissioned by residents. Not their photographs. Not our own, taken in May this year.
Garron Gsell, a chairperson of the Tijgerhof Residents Association, who has looked into various cases involving the tribunal, 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.
We put dozens of questions to the City of Cape Town across this series. Most went unanswered. Where the city did respond, it defended each decision on its own terms, without addressing why so many of them point in the same direction.
Throughout my investigation, what I discovered, again and again, is that the DA-led City of Cape Town is manipulating the law in favour of developers. Ordinary residents and ratepayers are at the mercy of a rigged system, the questions they have been asking for years remain unanswered: who made these decisions, when, and why? DM