GOOD, ActionSA slam DA for Cape Town township neglect after public protector findings

Opposition parties have called on the DA to account over the City of Cape Town’s failure to provide basic municipal services to the Langa and Khayelitsha townships.

This follows a four-year investigation by public protector Kholeka Gcaleka who likened the failure to maladministration and improper conduct. The findings were released on Tuesday and detailed several failures, ranging from deteriorating sewer infrastructure, waste collection, inadequate access to water and unsafe housing conditions.

GOOD party secretary-general Brett Herron criticised the findings for its strong contradiction of the city’s pro-poor budget claims.

Instead, Herron said the public protector’s findings confirmed that the DA-run city delivered inferior services to areas where people of colour lived.

Herron also referred to the Constitutional Court judgment which found that the city had under-performed in respect of its constitutional obligations to unstitch the apartheid spatial plan as the first of the blows to strike the DA.

“Public protector and (Constitutional Court) findings and orders carry particular societal weight in a highly politicised South Africa because they are not party political players.”

According to Herron, the idea that the DA’s most recent 2026/27 adopted budget and its infrastructure spend was pro-poor was inexplicable.

“The city has provided no ward-level breakdowns or explained its methodology to support that figure. The public protector’s findings precisely document constitutionally binding service failure that a genuine pro-poor infrastructure programme would have prevented.”

GOOD maintained that it the council could not claim that three-quarters of its infrastructure budget served poor communities while the public protector had found it guilty of providing dysfunctional sewage systems, as well as dysfunctional access to water and street lighting.

“A budget document that asserts equity without evidence, and a constitutional finding that documents its absence. The two positions are mutually incompatible,” Herron said.

GOOD called on its councillors in the municipality to closely monitor the prescribed deadlines to ensure that the city complies, as well as to check the accuracy of the information provided by the city to the public protector.

ActionSA welcomed the public protector’s findings, saying that Gcaleka has painted a damning picture of a city that had failed to fulfil its legal obligations.

ActionSA MP and Western Cape leader Dereleen James accused the DA of abandoning these communities through years of neglect, calling them guilty of maladministration.

“No government can claim success when entire communities are repeatedly denied the basic standard of service delivery that every resident deserves. A city cannot call itself “best run” while large sections of its population continue to experience second-class services."

James referred to a Constitutional Court judgment against the City of Cape Town and Western Cape government delivered days ago on spatial planning.

“The court ruled against them for perpetuating apartheid spatial planning through their failure to provide affordable, well-located housing.

“Together, these findings paint an unmistakable picture of a DA-led administration that has failed to dismantle the inequalities of the past and has instead actively worked to deepen them.”

Gcaleka emphasised the importance of redress in the discharging of the constitutional mandate of service delivery.

“We need to ensure equitable distribution of resources in line with the constitution for township service delivery in order to address the imbalances of the past,” said Gcaleka.

The public protector gave the finance minister six months within which to convene a meeting with his human settlements peer in cabinet as well as the provincial co-operative governance and traditional affairs departments.

According to Gcaleka, the cohort must probe whether the existing intergovernmental fiscal framework as well as equitable share allocations are adequately supporting municipalities amid service delivery backlogs.

“In conducting the assessment, to consider the extent to which existing fiscal allocations and funding mechanisms enable municipalities to progressively realise the constitutional rights of residents to access basic municipal services, taking into account the competing demands on the national fiscus and the need to balance the equitable distribution of nationally raised revenue among the three spheres of government.”

TimesLIVE