Speaker, councillors, city colleagues, residents, and members of the media, good morning.
I wish to express my condolences to those families who have lost loved ones as a result of the recent taxi violence, the gang violence that plagues our communities, and to the family, friends and colleagues of late councillor, Nokuthula Bolitye.
Uniting against Looting and Violence
It has been a tough few weeks for our country, and while Cape Town was spared the chaos, looting-related violence and economic sabotage that affected other parts of South Africa, the impact on the economy will be felt by all. The relationship between government and citizen is crucial for cohesion, to ensure safety, and to facilitate economic growth. So it was with much pride that I joined numerous neighbourhood watches, walking busses, and safety organisations on the ground during the turmoil that was affecting the rest of the country, to see how our own communities were standing up and saying ‘no looting will be allowed here’.
For years the City of Cape Town and Western Cape Government has invested in supporting, training and equipping local neighbourhood watches to help with increasing safety in their neighbourhoods. Together, the City and Province are supporting 197 accredited NWs in the metro totaling over 8000 members, a significant force for community safety.
In recent years, the City has roughly trebled the number of wards supported with NHW equipment to the tune of over R20 million. I have joined many of these groups over the years and patrolled with them during the evenings. I still regularly join our neighbourhood watches for patrols and encourage all councillors to do the same. Check if you can support your neighbourhood watch by facilitating training in first aid, understanding the relevant safety legislation and whether they need safety equipment to help them in their duties.
I also want to applaud the recently appointed Western Cape Police Commissioner, Major General Pathekile, as well as the City’s Metro Police and Law Enforcement for working together with the shared goal of making sure our communities stay safe. All our safety authorities working together as a united front deserves to be commended. In acknowledging the commitment from our residents and safety authorities to keep Cape Town safe, I want to once again welcome the British and Irish Lions, as well as our world cup winning Springboks to our beautiful city. While the first test match didn’t go our way I know our men in green and gold are going to make us proud on Saturday!
Taxi Violence and Transport initiatives
Speaker, while we were able to prevent the looting and public unrest from spilling over into our city, we unfortunately have had to once again be subjected to the fallout from the greed and selfishness of taxi organisations who are clearly putting profit before the customers that they rely on. Lives have been lost because of their greed and this is simply unacceptable.
It is clear that the Western Cape Government has done all they can to try and address this situation, including the closure of a major route. The internal fighting of the two taxi associations has wreaked havoc on our public transport system and as the rail network has also all but collapsed, more and more daily commuters rely on road-based public transport. It is clear that our residents need a functioning taxi transport system and I hope that those organisations involved in the dispute will put their differences aside out of basic respect for those they provide a service to, and out of duty to our country, which simply cannot afford further economic disruption.
As the City of Cape Town, we have been in discussions with the Western Cape Government about how best to address these shortcomings, and we have offered to roll out additional MyCiti busses to cover the serious gaps that have been left by the taxi associations.
While the National Treasury have told us that we cannot continue with a study to determine how and if the City should take over the running of the local rail network, I have written to President Ramaphosa to ask for his urgent intervention as we simply cannot continue like this. It is clear for all to see that the rail network, a national government function, has been severely mismanaged for years and to allow it to continue like this would be a dereliction of duty by the President. The President should be doing all he can to help Cape Town’s residents as we remain the one centre of hope in this country where foreign investors continue to bring their business.
Before council today is the MYFIN finance plan for the Transport Directorate, which aims to define an optimised public transport system that meets the business objectives and will achieve fiscal and financial sustainability / business viability with a view towards delivering:
- the Continued operationalisation of Phase 1
- the Reintroduction of the N2 Express;
- addressing Phase 2A – capital costs
- roll out of Phase 2A – operations in latter periods of MYFIN
- Bus acquisition and replacement for all phases of the MyCiTi
- Costs associated with minibus taxi (MBT) industry transition for Phase 2A.
- an integrated public transport service between the communities of Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Philippi, Claremont and Wynberg.
The rolling out Phase 2A of our Integrated Public Transport Plan will see an estimated total capital expenditure in excess of R10 billion, of which more than R1,0 billion will be spent in the 2021/22 MTREF, making this the largest Mega Project ever approved for Public Transport for the City of Cape Town.
In a time of severe economic contraction amid a global pandemic, the roll out of our plan will provide numerous benefits including:
- Poverty alleviating job opportunities, which includes 7,206 jobs as a direct result of construction work; 800 permanent employment opportunities owing to operations; and 250 to 300 additional job opportunities within the corridor.
In terms of Phase 1, and capital expenditure for Phase 2A, the 2021/22 MTREF is balanced to the MYFIN (3 years). As with standard budgetary cycles, the National Budget only responds to allocations for 3 years as per the Division of Revenue Act. The City has been engaging with National Government to ensure sufficient grant funding in support of capital expenditure associated with infrastructure works, and the operationalisation of Phase 2A services in the outer years of this project.
The City’s Economic Outlook
Speaker, we have unfortunately seen how the failure of governance in the rest of the country is affecting confidence in the country overall, given the Moody’s ratings agency blanket downgrade of all metros as a sector. Moody’s indicates the blanket ratings downgrade are due to poor revenue collection. This may well be the case in other metros, but as recently as June 2021 Moody’s praised Cape Town’s unmatched 98,9% revenue collection rate. This high collection rate is unprecedented in South African municipalities. There is clearly a conflict in their findings and we have written to Moody’s for clarity.
The high collection rate is in no small part due to the trust residents have in their City, with Cape Town being voted the most trusted metro in the country for the seventh time in a row according to the 2020 Consulta Citizen Satisfaction Index. Cape Town was further found to be the most financially sustainable metro and more capable of absorbing the financial shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Ratings Afrika sustainability survey of 2020.
Speaker, in terms of economic recovery, I am pleased to see continued progress with one aspect of our plans, and that is the ongoing prioritisation and processing of building applications with a committment to having these done within 30 days. From 1 May until 15 July this year, the City of Cape Town approved a further R3,6bn in building application approvals, leading to a total of nearly R21bn in approvals since the start of the national Covid-19 lockdown. With more than 40 000 jobs being created through this work it is clear that Cape Town is committed to seeing our economy flourish once again.
The City has hosted a number of meetings with the business sector in recent weeks, including the Cape Chamber of Commerce, Mitchells Plain Chamber of Commerce, and World Bank.
These meetings will continue to ensure that we continue to work together with the shared goal of economic recovery for Cape Town. It is important to point out with regards to the building plan approvals, that the Mitchell’s Plain and Khayelitsha district makes up half (680) of the total new building plan approvals between May 1 and July 15, and counts among the top two planning districts in Cape Town in terms of the number of building plans approved. Clearly there is a lot of building activity in these communities, meaning more employment opportunities being created.
Our Fight against Covid-19
The City has a healthy cash flow and balance sheet, and should not be grouped with under-performing metros. Another area where Cape Town continues to fare better than the rest of the country is in our covid-19 vaccination campaign. I am pleased to see that all ages from 18 upwards are now able to register for the vaccine, with the vaccinations for the 18-34 age group being rolled out from 1 September.
With approximately 200 vaccination centres run by the Western Cape Government and City of Cape Town as well as the conversion of the CTICC into a mass vaccination centre and the Athlone Stadium being converted into a drive-through vaccination centre, more than one million vaccines have been administered across the province – for this, our residents should be very proud. The sooner we can reach a majority of vaccinated residents the sooner the national government can stop enforcing lockdowns that do huge damage to the economy and which consequently has a major negative impact on thousands of residents.
Closing remarks
Speaker I have also noted how some politicians continue to misrepresent the City and make false claims in the media. Most recently this was around potholes with a false claim that there was a backlog of 35 000 potholes, when the backlog is currently under 7000 as the City has maintained an 80% completion rate of all potholes reported.
As much as we would love to have a 100% completion the winter rains make it practically impossible in many instances to do permanent repairs as the wet ground means any repairs will simply be undone over a short period. We do however do temporary repairs while waiting for more suitable weather to do the permanent repair work.
We know that we are not perfect, no municipality can be. We try our best, but with a limited budget and numerous competing interests, there will always be areas where we unfortunately fall short. We welcome feedback that allows us to address any shortcomings and put right anything we haven’t done properly, but blatant misrepresentation only does harm and is in no way constructive, but this is what we have come to expect from some politicians – they have long abandoned the truth and are only capable of lies and misrepresentation, which is not very good.
Speaker, in closing I want to once again call on our councillors to remember to always be present in your communities, make sure you are available to the residents we serve, and be the channel through which any concerns can be raised so that we can address those concerns without delay. Do not shy away from any problems, let us face them together, because that is our duty and our responsibility. We will make our communities safer, better, and more prosperous by taking hands and working together.