The City of Cape Town has published a formidable library of budget documents for 2025/26: a covering report, an updated annexure pack, grant frameworks, an August 2025 adjustments budget, and dozens of supporting tables and plans on its official budget portal.
This matters because budgets are not just spreadsheets. Budgets are the moral architecture of a city. They decide whose time is wasted, whose dignity is delayed, whose neighbourhood is repaired first, and whose future is postponed another winter without dignity.
And that is exactly why Capetonians must not be hypnotised by slogans.The Democratic Alliance Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’s central political claim has been repeated publicly: “a full 75% of this [three-year] infrastructure investment directly benefits lower-income households.”
That is a very specific claim. If it is true, it should be easy to prove in a way that ordinary residents can verify: a ward-by-ward, Sub Council by Sub Council map of capital projects, showing what is being built, where, when, and for whom. Not just a total figure. Not a press release. A map. SHOW CAPETONIANS THE MONEY!!
So here is the first challenge to the Mayor:
Mayor Hill-Lewis, publish the evidence behind the 75% claim as a ward-by-ward capital map not a speech line. Until that evidence is published in a way that Capetonians can interrogate, the claim remains political marketing and your own documents raise serious questions about whether “hope” is being spent on breaking barriers or merely maintaining the city we already have.
What a “ward allocation” really is (and why the City loves to talk about it)
Most residents hear “ward allocation” and assume it means “money for service delivery in my area.” The City’s own budget portal lists “Operating and Capital Ward Allocation Projects Supported by Sub Council” as a formal budget annexure.
The reality is more modest and more political.A ward allocation is a small, ward-linked pot that gets chopped into micro-projects under Sub Council .It is visible, local, and easy to publicise which makes it perfect for political messaging.
If you open the City’s ward allocation annexure (for 2025/26), you immediately see the pattern: ward totals are typically around R1 million, sometimes less, distributed across multiple line items capacity building, festivals, awareness programmes, sports tournaments, small maintenance, minor traffic calming.
Your own ward allocation PDF for 2025/26 shows the same pattern in township and working-class wards: R1,000,000 totals split into programmes and small projects. In Ward 6 (Wallacedene), for example, the list includes a sports tournament and arts/culture showcasing, plus cleaning/security for a local space and the total is R1,000,000. In Ward 101 (Bloekombos), it is again R1,000,000, split across a spectator stand, youth programmes, ECD equipment, seniors programmes, and other small items.
So let’s be honest with ourselves as Capetonians: Ward allocations are not the City’s main engine for reversing apartheid infrastructure backlogs.They are a micro-spend layer that is easy to advertise, easy to slice into “deliverables,” and politically convenient.
That leads to the second challenge:
Mayor, why do you foreground ward allocations in your “hope” narrative when they are structurally too small and too fragmented to deal with township and backyarder infrastructure backlogs? Uniformity is not equity: the flat ward pot ignores density, backlogs, and backyarders
The ward allocation model repeatedly presents near-uniform amounts across wards, regardless of the radically different conditions people live under.
But a ward in Khayelitsha, Nyanga or Philippi is not the same “unit” of need as a ward in a low-density, fully serviced suburb. In the Metro South-East, the lived reality is:
- overcrowding and backyarder density loading old networks,
- informal settlement growth pressing water, sanitation and stormwater systems,
- longer commutes and higher transport costs,
- flooding, sewage spills, blocked drains, and delayed repairs.A flat “R1 million” approach is therefore not “fair.” It is administrative neutrality that guarantees unequal outcomes.
That is the third challenge:
Mayor, why do you treat unequal wards as if they are equal and then call the result ‘pro-poor’? Pro-poor rhetoric ≠ pro-poor outcomes: the documents show a maintenance-first cityThe City’s main budget annexure (Annexure A for the 2025/26–2027/28 budget) sets out the size and funding of the City’s capital programme, including multi-year appropriations and sources like grants, borrowings and internal funds.
That is important but it doesn’t answer the lived question: what changes in poor communities because of this?
Here is the uncomfortable truth: much of what a big metro must spend on is renewal, replacement, and compliance. That is not evil; it is necessary. But when your city is defined by apartheid space, a maintenance-first bias becomes a political choice: you end up keeping the functioning city functioning, while the historically excluded city receives stopgaps.
That is exactly what many township residents experience: maintenance without mobility and maintenance without dignity.
Even within adjustments, where you see what is reduced or shifted, township-linked mobility and safety items appear on the wrong side too often. The April 2025 adjustments budget includes specific reductions in township corridor upgrades for non-motorised transport including Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, and Klipfontein Road, Gugulethu.
Those are not abstract lines. Those are the routes where schoolchildren walk, where workers traverse unsafe edges to reach taxis and buses, where “last mile” is not a lifestyle concept it’s survival.
So the fourth challenge is simple:
Mayor, why are township mobility and safety upgrades repeatedly vulnerable to reductions, delays and rephasing while you keep selling aggregate totals as if they automatically become township benefit?
Procurement tells the truth: what the City is geared to deliverIf you want to know what a budget will become in reality, look at procurement. The City’s procurement plan shows what is actually being contracted and delivered.
In the 2025/26 Demand/Procurement Plan you shared, you can see large tenders aligned to major assets for example, the marine outfalls mechanical and electrical upgrades line. You also see large network works and related procurement streams (for example, major sanitation trunk works).
Again: not “wrong.” But here is the political test:
Where is the procurement intensity for permanent informal settlement sanitation dignity at scale? Are you ever going to deal with backlogs for the poor?
Where are the visible, contracted programmes that replace unsafe toilets with safe solutions, that reduce emergency servicing cycles, that upgrade overloaded township sewer reticulation under backyarder density, that cut flooding risk in the basins that suffer every winter?
A city can spend billions and still leave poor communities stuck in an “emergency services” loop. That is what “maintenance without transformation” looks like.
So where is the evidence for “75% directly benefits the poor”?
The City and DA communications repeat the claim confidently. A local explainer repeats the same framing and lists broad capital themes (water and sanitation, transport, housing, social package).
But the citizen’s question remains unanswered:
Show us the measurement method. Show us the geographic distribution. Show us the project list. Show us the beneficiaries in plain, verifiable terms.
Because from the ward allocation documents, what is visible at local level is not “barrier-breaking” infrastructure. It is mostly micro-programmes and small projects valuable, but not transformative.
And from the adjustments and procurement, the pattern of what gets delayed and what gets protected does not convincingly align with a “direct benefit” claim unless the City can show the method and the map.
The questions Capetonians must now ask publicly, repeatedly, confidently.Here are the questions that should dominate every civic meeting, ratepayers’ forum, community hall gathering, and newsroom interview:
- Mayor, publish your 75% methodology and a ward-by-ward capital map. What counts as “direct benefit”? Who decided? Show us the money… or withdraw your lies…
- Show “township transformation spend” separately from “city maintenance spend.” What portion of capital is genuinely barrier-breaking?
- Why are ward allocations near-uniform despite unequal need and why do they skew toward programmes rather than core infrastructure?
- Explain the rephasing. Why do township mobility lines show up among reductions while major asset programmes remain protected?
- Where is the backyarder infrastructure plan? Cape Town’s fastest-growing “settlement type” is Backyarders yet budgets still treat it as a footnote.
Conclusion:
Hope is not a slogan hope is a sewer that works and a commute that shrinksCape Town does not need another glossy advert. It needs truthfulness: a city willing to admit that budgeting can reproduce inequality even under clean audits; that pro-poor rhetoric can diverge from pro-poor outcomes through sequencing and rephasing; that townships can be trapped in maintenance without mobility.
Mayor Hill-Lewis, if your budget truly is “invested in hope,” stop asking Capetonians to believe you. Show us the map. Show us the measurement. Show us the projects by ward and by Sub Council. And show us, in plain language, how your budget breaks the barriers of apartheid space instead of merely keeping the city running for those who already have functioning infrastructure.
Capetonians are ready for that conversation. Wa isse Geld? Wie benefit?
What we are not ready for is another year of slogans.
* Faiez Jacobs is a former Member of Parliament, founder of The Transcendence Group, Capetonian, Activist, and Servant of the People.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of or Independent Media.
