Cape Town's seven mayoral candidates debate housing, jobs and policing

Seven candidates who want to run Cape Town shared one stage in Sea Point on Tuesday night and spent most of the 90 minutes arguing about the same thing: whether the city works for everyone who lives in it.

The debate was carried live by SABC News from its Sea Point studios, the second in the broadcaster’s series of mayoral debates. The incumbent, Jordan Hill Lewis of the Democratic Alliance, sat alongside Jeremiah Thinsma of the ANC, Cheslyn Daniels of the Patriotic Alliance, Brett Herron of the Good party, Fadil Adams of the National Coloured Congress, Nandondo Noluchungu of the EFF and Daryl James of Action SA.

No live audience was invited, so the candidates spoke to the moderator and to each other.

The argument nobody dropped

Every opposition candidate opened on the same theme, that Cape Town is two cities sharing one boundary, one served and one waiting.

Hill Lewis answered it directly. He said the two-city charge is the only political narrative his opponents have left, and that none of them can name a municipality among South Africa’s 257 that does a better job than Cape Town. He said the city has grown its economy and created more jobs in the last five years than the country’s seven other metros combined, and has delivered more state-subsidised housing than all of them together.

Adams said the claim is selective. He said the MyCiTi bus service reached the areas it now serves in the Cape Flats 15 years after it was rolled out to areas that did not need it, and called the current extension a sign that the governing party’s grip on the city is slipping.

Noluchungu said refuse collection cannot work on the same weekly schedule in Langa as it does in Camps Bay, because people in the townships live on top of one another. She said the city’s spatial planning still forces residents to leave home before sunrise to reach work.

What the record shows on housing

The sharpest exchange of the night was between Hill Lewis and Herron, and it turned on a set of inner-city sites.

Herron said the city ran a tender process on five inner-city sites between September 2017 and February 2018, drew 13 bids and then saw the projects stopped by the DA caucus. He said he accompanied Hill Lewis to a meeting with a property developer in Woodstock, was questioned by the developer’s board about whether he was proposing tent cities, and that the party’s fundraising reports showed zero rand from that developer every month afterwards.

Hill Lewis rejected the account. He said the sites are now under construction or close to it, including Salt River Market, and that social housing has been completed in Pinelands, Maitland, Goodwood and Bellville. He said the same people who blocked Herron then have agreed to proceed now, which suggests the problem was Herron rather than the blockers.

Thinsma put the ANC’s case on the same ground. He said the city has refused to use well-located land for social housing, and cited the Tafelberg site, which he said the Constitutional Court used as an example. He said people who work in Sea Point and Bantry Bay should be able to live near their work instead of travelling from before dawn.

Herron said the city argued in the Constitutional Court that it had no constitutional duty to redress apartheid spatial planning, and that a DA premier once told him that using well-located public land for affordable housing was over-subsidising the poor.

Jobs, and who creates them

Daniels said the city did not create the 418 000 jobs it claims, and that its own contribution is short-term Expanded Public Works Programme contracts lasting a month, three months, six months or at most a year. He said that is not sustainable for communities.

Hill Lewis did not dispute that the private sector creates jobs. He said businesses and investors go to places that work, and that is why Cape Town’s economy grows faster than metros run by the parties attacking him.

James said the focus of the city is on investors rather than on its people. She described five families living in one house and said people become territorial when what they had is taken away.

Policing powers, and the killings in Johannesburg

The debate opened with condolences. Seven bodies of women were found in Johannesburg on Tuesday, and candidates from the EFF, Action SA and the ANC all spoke to them.

James wore black and said South African women are not okay. She said gender-based violence has no face and cannot be separated from potholes, long grass and street lights that do not work, because crime breeds where services fail.

Hill Lewis used the killings to restate the city’s demand for more policing powers. He said the city’s resolve to fight for those powers is renewed, and that they are the only way to break the back of violent crime in Cape Town.

Thinsma answered that the killings are a daily experience on the Cape Flats, and that the metro police is used against the South African Police Service rather than alongside it.

The next date

The municipal election is on 4 November. Roughly two million people of voting age live in the metro, out of a population approaching five million, and the city contributes about 10% of national GDP.

The Democratic Alliance has held the city since 2006. The debate is one of a series SABC News is running across the metros before the poll.

Source: SABC News (YouTube), SABC News Mayoral Debate for the City of Cape Town - Pt1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKzlATIkQAQ