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Only the corrupt would disagree with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s plea to ANC councillors to stop stealing, but to set DA-run municipalities in Cape Town and Stellenbosch as the benchmark for good governance spits in the faces of millions of poorer people whose quality of life is desperately low.

Cape Town and Stellenbosch may obtain good audit results, but they are global benchmarks for inequality.

According to the Western Cape MEC for Infrastructure, Tertuis Simmers, there are 1,274 informal settlements in the province (828 of them in Cape Town). More than 400,000 households are in need of proper homes. The overwhelming majority of these people live in DA-led municipal areas. The province had met its target of upgrading one informal settlement in 2024/2025, Simmers said. 

Does meeting this target while obtaining an unqualified audit represent good governance, or does setting such a low target reflect unwillingness to address inequality and, therefore, constitutional delinquency? 

It is true that DA-led municipalities obtain vastly superior audit results than ANC-led municipalities, but where do the benefits lie for millions of people in Cape Town who live in fear of their and their children’s lives due to systemic gang violence? The environments in which these people live are breeding grounds for anti-social behaviour, but are left undisturbed.

Over the past 5+ years, I have repeatedly been called to assist Cape Flats communities struggling to get the Cape Town Council to attend to water and sewerage problems. Raw sewerage in the streets is not uncommon, nor necessarily swiftly fixed, though not in the leafy suburb where I live (or where the President lives when in Cape Town).

There are many other examples of profound unfairness in Cape Town, on which clean audits have proven to have zero effect. 

South African citizens deserve higher standards than having to choose between a self-confessed party of looters and a party that uses clean audits as a platform from which to proclaim its morality while sustaining inequality.

The President’s plea to his councillors reflects the calibre of people the ANC regards as fit to govern. Governments in functional societies should be judged on their delivery, and not on whether or not they are thieves. 

Issued by Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament