Cape Town’s budget of R76bn focuses on infrastructure, water
The City of Cape Town has tabled its budget for 2024, saying it is investing a record amount of R12.1bn in infrastructure, with more than 40% of that going to water, sanitation and sewer upgrades.
Delivering the R76.4bn budget at the city council on Wednesday, mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said infrastructure spend was 75% higher than in his first budget as mayor two years ago.
He said he wanted to make Cape Town work “by investing, on an unprecedented scale, in the city’s infrastructure”.
Almost half of infrastructure spend would go to water as “that is where the pressure point is”, Hill-Lewis said.
The budget is open for comment until May and will be finalised by end-May.
Johannesburg has been hit by severe water cuts as ageing infrastructure can no longer deliver water reliably to SA’s economic hub.
Hill-Lewis said the recent Capital Expenditure Project Listing published by Nedbank found that Cape Town projects accounted for a staggering 60% of the R100bn in government infrastructure projects announced across SA in 2023.
“No other city in the country comes close to the scale of this infrastructure budget.”
Hill-Lewis said the R715m Cape Flats bulk sewer upgrade was the largest sewer upgrade project of its kind nationally. Water and sewage projects took time as they required excavation to lay or fix pipes, he said.
Infrastructure spend targeted Cape Town’s fastest-growing and poorest areas, which have been historically underdeveloped.
The budget also revealed property rates will rise 5.7%, refuse removal 5.7% and water and sanitation 6.8% from July 1. Electricity will rise 11.78% in July.
Hill-Lewis called on the national government again to allow metro cops “greater powers of investigation” to deal better with crime, gangsterism and illegal firearms and put criminals behind bars.
Many of the Cape Flats suburbs are dominated by gangsterism, extortion, drugs and crime.
He said the justice minister could devolve provincial policing power to city officials with the “stroke of a pen”.
“We will not stop advocating for this devolution of policing powers, because we know that with those powers we could really crack down on crime in Cape Town. The increasing infiltration of organised crime into more and more of ordinary life is of profound concern,” he said.
In the budget, almost R800m is set aside to fix and replace traffic lights hit by cable theft. The mayor called on the courts to take cable theft seriously as an economic crime rather than petty theft.
In an exchange after presenting the budget with a member of the Patriotic Alliance (PA), HillLewis said that where the DA was in charge there was clean water, while in Knysna, where the PA is in charge in a coalition with the ANC, there were “dead bodies in the water system”, referring to an incident in which dead body was found in a water reservoir in November.
GOOD counsellor Shahiem van Nelson asked when the city would upgrade plumbing in Delft township blocks of flats and attend to problems there.
Hill-Lewis said the biggest housing project in the city was in Delft with 3 500 houses under construction, but it ground to halt when a colleague was murdered on site by extortionists. He was referring to the murder of a city official last February.
The Delft project would be starting again soon after the city increased spending significantly on security and found a new contractor.
Human settlements MMC Carl Pophaim said the city would continue to tackle and stand up to construction mafia who extort developers and threaten contractors and demand jobs or a cut of the project.
“The state of housing delivery in Cape Town is strong. We have sent clear messages to those who wish to stop us that we will not tolerate it,” Pophaim said.