Council Speech by the City of Cape Town Mayor

Madam Speaker,

Fellow Councillors,

Honoured guests and members of the public,

Goeiemôre, molweni, as-salamu alaykum, shalom, good morning.

I am sure you were as thrilled by that incredible choral performance as I was. These youngsters from the Tygerberg Children's Choir have done South Africa, and Cape Town, extremely proud.

Fresh from their first place in the children's section of the Hull International Choir Competition in the UK in April, and their number four world ranking of out 1 000 choirs worldwide, they have qualified to take part in the World Choir Games in New Zealand next year.

The thousands of hours of work that go into crafting a performance like this speaks to an attitude and a personal drive that we all could learn from. It also speaks to an amazing level of support and sacrifice by the choir leaders and parents.

Thank you to everyone involved in helping this wonderful choir reach these heights. We will be watching you and willing you to win at the World Choir Games next year. Going by what we just heard here this morning, the sky is the limit for the Tygerberg Children's Choir.

Staying on the topic of performing on a global stage, I would like to extend a warm welcome to the 16 teams who have arrived in Cape Town for the 2023 Netball World Cup, which starts on Friday evening at the CTICC when our Proteas take on Wales in the opening match.

Cape Town is ready, and Africa's first-ever Netball World Cup is going to be one to remember.

You might have spotted the beautiful murals that have gone up across the city in places like Langa, Strand, Mitchells Plain, Atlantis, and Khayelitsha, and we've set up a fantastic fan park outside the CTICC where netball fans can come and enjoy free all-day viewing and entertainment.

If you can't get to the fan park there are also four public viewing areas in Langa, Khayelitsha, Bellville, and Mitchell's Plain. We want the whole of Cape Town to experience the excitement and the spirit of this global sports event.

Of course, our eyes will be firmly on Pool C, where the Proteas will battle it out against Wales, Jamaica and Sri Lanka, but there are incredible matches lined up across the whole competition and we cannot wait for the first centre pass on Friday evening.

I wish all the teams and all their traveling supporters a very warm welcome to the Mother City and a wonderful Netball World Cup 2023.

Madam Speaker,

We have just come to the end of our first full financial year in office, where we implemented our own budget determined by this government.

Having now reached the end of the financial year, we have a track record to look back on – a precedent of this administration's ability to turn the promise of a budget into the proof of delivery.

Let's consider the progress we have made together.

First, we need to celebrate a new record for Cape Town.

We have just clocked the highest capital expenditure the City has ever achieved – even exceeding the mega projects before the 2010 World Cup.

This year, we have invested a record R6,94 billion in capital investment and infrastructure this past year, or 93,5% of our planned budget.

And we are only just getting started. This is the first year of our four-year major infrastructure acceleration, that is already making a difference in our city.

What makes this number even more impressive is the fact that this was the first time ever that the City didn't allow any mid-year write-downs. This speaks to a significant culture adjustment, and really puts that 93,5% of capital investment into perspective.

If you look within that figure, you will also see that a number of directorates performed exceptionally well.

Human Settlements spent 99,3% of its capital budget – over R880 million. Safety and Security spent 99,6% of its capital budget – over R280 million. And among what I call the "billion club" (no, that isn't the name of an ANC branch) – this is the name I give to those of our directorates with capital investment budgets of more than a billion Rand each – Water & Sanitation, Urban Mobility, and Energy – Water and Sanitation has achieved a 95% capital spend – over R2,05 billion, while Energy spent an incredible 96,9% of its capital budget, just over R1 billion.

All of that with no mid-year write-downs. That speaks to how seriously we are taking this mission to build a City of Hope. We are blessed with an extraordinary calibre of City officials here in Cape Town, and everyone is on board with the plan.

Everyone is committed.

Including everyone in the governing caucus here, and I thank them for their commitment to see this capital investment through.

That's the big difference between Cape Town and the other metros that are really struggling right now.

But colleagues, these things don't just happen by themselves. We have been building the capacity of this administration – particularly in project management – precisely so that we are in a position to make good on the promises of record budgets.

And in the coming years, we are going to rely heavily on that capacity, because our capex budget is ramping up significantly over the next three years.

In fact, we've just set a new record, but we're still only in year one of our four- year infrastructure acceleration. We're just getting started. 

R7,4bn becomes R11bn in this new financial year, then R14bn next year, and R18bn in 2025. That's a 134% increase over the next three years, bringing us to a total of well over R50bn in this term of office.

That money will buy the residents of Cape Town a substantial amount of sewer and water pipes, sewerage pump stations, wastewater works, road upgrades, electricity grid maintenance, safety technology, as well as equipment and vehicles.

I've made the point before that our capex spend over this three-year period will be more than Johannesburg and Durban combined. If that didn't mean anything to you before, I hope it does now following the fatal explosion in Johannesburg's Bree Street.

While it is still to be determined whether the blast was due to a natural gas leak, a build-up of sewer gas, or a combination of the two, it is clear that the city's neglected and chaotic underground infrastructure played a major part.

The failure to clean and maintain sewer pipes, the failure to expand sanitation infrastructure as a city grows, and the failure to comply with safety protocols in the planning and building of infrastructure not only robs residents of dignified services, it can also be deadly.

We must show that a different future is possible. That is why we are investing so heavily in our city's infrastructure, and particularly our water and sanitation infrastructure.

It is a wonderful tribute to the outgoing Executive Director, Mike Webster, that Water & Sanitation –successfully spent 95% of its hugely increased budget this year.

Under Mike's steady hand, Water & Sanitation has become a flagship department in the City, and has really carried the banner for our mission to build a City of Hope.

Entrusted with the lion's share of the budget, his directorate has delivered and exceeded their targets. And we're not talking small targets either.

Given the ambitious target to double the City's sewer pipe replacement from 25km to 50km, they exceeded this target when they laid 55,16km of sewer pipe by the close of the financial year on 30 June.

If you think that's impressive, the target for this current financial year is to double that again to 100km of sewer pipe, and I have no doubt that they will reach this target too.

Just as I have no doubt that, they will successfully complete the biggest sewer upgrade project ever undertaken in South Africa – the R715 million Cape Flats Bulk Sewer upgrade – by its scheduled completion date in 2025.

Some 300 000 households in neighbourhoods like Athlone, Hanover Park, Lotus River, Ottery, Grassy Park, Eagle Park, and Pelican Park will benefit from this massive project, where we are upgrading bulk sewers built all the way back in the 1960s.

This will be a game-changer for the residents of those neighbourhoods, and for the city, as we secure dignified sanitation services for these communities for the next hundred years.

That's what we mean when we say we're building a City of Hope here in Cape Town.

I would also like to briefly make a point about the ramifications of this kind of investment. We often report back on projects of the City in isolation, without necessarily connecting the dots between them. But I want to assure you that that there is a link between most things we do.

We have spoken at length about our ongoing work to upgrade, replace and expand the city's water and sanitation infrastructure.

Separately, I recently spoke of building plan approvals in the City, and how Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain once again topped the number of residential building plans approved for the 21/22 financial year and were on track to repeat this for 22/23.

That would not be possible if it weren't for the big investments were making in those areas. Record infrastructure investment and record building plan approvals are a cause and effect.

This holds true for every single area in which Cape Town is bucking the national trend – from attracting new investments to GDP growth to unemployment. Just like the building plan approvals in Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, these things follow investment in infrastructure by the City.

That is why the amounts we're pumping into water and sanitation projects over the next three years will smash all previous records.

This includes R8,6bn on Wastewater Treatment Works upgrades, R1,3 billion for sewer spill responsiveness including the proactive jetting of 200km annually, R1,4 billion in bulk sewer upgrades to the Milnerton, Cape Flats, Gordon's Bay and Philippi lines, as well as R2,2bn under the New Water Plan to build water resilience.

It also includes 23 new high-tech trucks, at a cost of R53m – including jet machine trucks, vacuum tanker trucks and jet vacuum combination trucks – to help the City deal more quickly with sewer blockages, overflows and spills.

These projects have put Cape Town on a trajectory for growth, and we couldn't have asked for a better person to oversee this massive budget expansion and all the complexities that come with this scale of work than Mike Webster.

I want to use this opportunity to thank Mike for the many years of dedicated and selfless service he has given the residents of Cape Town, and for the way he rose to the challenge of making our water and sanitation infrastructure pipeline the flagship of our mission to future-proof our city.

Mike, we wish you all the best for your next chapter, and we have no doubt that you will bring the same level of energy and professionalism to your new position. Cape Town's loss is most certainly the World Bank's gain.

Now let me return to that assessment:

As we fight to end load-shedding, we have issued renewable and dispatchable energy tenders for 200MW and up to 600MW, respectively; and awarded a tender for 60MW of demand management aggregation.

We concluded contracts for the Potsdam extension and upgrade, the second biggest infastructure project in the province.

We exceeded our 50km sewer-pipe-replacement target, ramped up repairs and upgrading of pump stations, and improved our response times to sewer spills. As a result we have seen significant improvements in water quality and a steady downward trend in sewer spills.

We have launched a 24-hour highway patrol and a 24-hour law enforcement deployment in the CBD, and all of our officers across the City are increasingly supported by cutting-edge technology like ANPR dash cams.

In a first for the African continent, we launched our own Ease-of-doing-business index to track our progress in continuously improving our systems and processes to make it easier for businesses to grow and create jobs

We have approved the release of well-located City land for more than 1100 social housing units this year.

We have broken ground on the MyCiti Metro South East corridor to Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, this being the biggest infrastructure project in the province.

We expanded two safe spaces in the CBD and one in Bellville, helping more than 1400 people off the streets. And we are building a third safe space in the CBD – our biggest to date, as we try all we can to address the complex issue of homelessness.

We approved a substantial review of the MSDF, and are nearly complete with a planning by-law amendment, both with a very clear focus on growing the economy and enabling investment.

We have started to get Capetonians to take more pride in a cleaner city, and started the long journey of changing public attitudes towards waste and litter. We've run a city-wide clean up that is about to kick into a higher gear as our annual Spring Clean approaches.

We have launched our new City App, improved the C3 system, in honour of pledge to make all services more digitally available to all residents, with more improvements coming.

And besides these big things, we are making progress in smaller but no less important things to. We are fixing buildings, re-opening community swimming pools, and I feel that sense of hope well up even when I see our newly-repaired old clock at the top of City Hall, which has not worked for nearly two decades but which now keeps the time perfectly.

Madam Speaker,

All of these things is how we declare to the world that Cape Town is the City of Hope, that we are open for business, that we are moving forward, despite the challenges our country still faces at a national level.

That is part of the reason we've seen 279 000 new jobs in Cape Town over the last four quarters, four straight quarters of job growth and another new record – the highest number of people employed in Cape Town ever, now at 1,7 million people.

That is why the whole world is taking notice – whether it be the Economist, the Financial Times, or the UK Telegraph – all just in the last month – and all recognising the hope rising in Cape Town.

But while we are doing all we can to open our doors to the world and invite business and jobs to Cape Town, the ANC in national government appears to be doing the exact opposite.

Yesterday, here in Cape Town, hundreds marched against the ANC's Employment Equity Amendment Act – legislation that reduces South Africa's workforce to crude racial quotas and makes it a punishable offense to transgress these race laws.

There is nothing to gain and everything to lose through this backwards-looking legislation.

With the stroke of a pen, the president has effectively made it a crime for a business to hire employees outside of their narrowly defined provincial race quotas, even when the demographic make-up of a particular community is entirely at odds with the provincial numbers.

This is legislation pretending to be just and progressive, but doing the exact opposite. Not only does it have the potential to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs – many of them highly skilled – it is also a red flag to every potential future investor in our country.

But it seems than none of these considerations are more important to the national government than the power and control that this legislation will give them. In a country with our levels of unemployment and our heart-breaking stories of poverty and exclusion, this is a terrible dereliction of duty and an abandonment of the people.

This Race Quotas Act must be rejected, as we reject it here.

South Africa's economic position is precarious enough as it is. We certainly cannot afford any more self-inflicted harm.

Our country's path to recovery should be built on the things that unlock potential and convince investors that we're a risk worth taking.

Our path to recovery has to be built with real bricks and mortar – with kilometres of pipes dug, power lines run, megawatts installed, concrete poured and tarmac laid.

In Cape Town, we're on that path already. We're building for the future, because we know that if we do this – if we make our city a good bet for the future – the investment, the businesses and the jobs will follow.

That's how you build a City of hope, and that's how we can build a Country of Hope.

Thank you.