Cape Town - The City council has passed mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’s administration’s second annual budget following two months of extensive engagement with City stakeholders, partners, residents, the business sector, non-government organisations and religious organisations.
As the city council passed the budget for the 2023/24 financial year yesterday, Hill-Lewis said the budget includes South Africa’s most comprehensive indigent relief package and a record infrastructure budget of R43 billion over three years.
Speaking at the council, Hill-Lewis repeated his assertion from April when he presented the council with the draft budget, that at just over R70bn, this budget was the biggest budget in Cape Town’s history.
He said while many other metros and municipalities across the country were struggling to keep up with service delivery demand and the substantial investment in infrastructure that this requires, the City had tabled a record R11bn capital expenditure budget.
“We have clear plans and targets to stay ahead of the rate of population growth and urbanisation in Cape Town.”
Hill-Lewis said: “Just the water and sanitation portion alone will grow from R2.3 billion this year to R7.8 billion in 2025/26.
“That is why we can take on mega-projects right across the metro. That is why Cape Town will be ready for the future.”
With regard to load shedding, Hill-Lewis said the City was expanding its interventions to end load shedding in Cape Town to the tune of R2.3bn over the next three years.
However, not everyone was as pleased with the budget as the mayor.
Stop CoCT founder Sandra Dickson said: “The mayor maintains ignorantly that it is commendable that the City outspends other metros, but the mayor fails to tell us that there was no affordability consideration in this budget.”
She said the mayor was oblivious to the hardship and difficulty of the working class of Cape Town, to afford this rampantly out-oftouch year-after-year above-inflation spending spree by the City.
On Tuesday, the ANC’s caucus on the council held a media briefing to pre-empt the mayor’s speech and said they would be rejecting the DA-led City’s budget as it was anti-poor.
In a statement, the ANC said after the budget was tabled in April, they went to their constituents to ask for their input and views on the budget tabled by the mayor as part of the public participation, but none of their views had been included in the budget.
The caucus statement said: “The bulk of this budget, 46%, goes to water and sanitation.
“Yet our children still need to navigate sewage when walking the streets of Nyanga, Crossroads and Philippi.”
The GOOD Party’s council finance spokesperson, Anton Louw, said the budget would make already struggling households even poorer.
He said the above-inflation tariff increases were coming from a City with more than enough savings in the bank.