In September 2021, the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) approached the Constitutional Court, followed by a litany of parties (no fewer than eight parties intervening and four as amicus curiae) arguing for an order postponing the local government election that was scheduled for October 27 of that year, to February 2022.
This was still in the long shadow of Covid-19 restrictions and on one of the few occasions during that Covid-19 period that our judiciary kept its collective head, and the justices declined to distort the electoral timetable. Maybe it helped that we were 18 months into the pandemic by then, long past the days of disinfecting groceries and not being able to go to an open-air beach.
The election was subsequently held on November 1 2021. The next local government elections must now be held five years, plus or minus three months, after the last one was held. That puts the window between September 2026 and February 2027. Hence the palpable sense that the election season has, in effect, kicked off with it likely happening within the coming 12 months.
Election season has started
Over the last three weeks, the commentariat and social media have busied themselves with the DA’s favourite and arguably best boast: clean governance. Some concede this DA success through gritted teeth. But curiously, various pundits and chronic social media posters have now adopted the position that clean audits don’t tell you much about good or inclusive governance.
This new angle sounds clever until you actually read the law. Clean audits do, in fact, point to good governance and pro-poor spending. The auditor-general doesn’t only ask whether money was spent where the budget said it would be spent. She checks whether organs of state followed the rules for supply chain management, whether they kept within the legal rails on how public money must be allocated and whether they met the requirements put in place precisely to protect the poor.
SA public finance law compels pro-poor spending. Section 153 of the constitution requires every municipality to structure its budget and planning processes to “give priority to the basic needs of the community” and to promote social and economic development.
Section 74 of the Municipal Systems Act obliges councils to adopt tariff policies that ensure access to at least basic services for poor households through lifeline tariffs or subsidies. And, the Division of Revenue Act, which governs how national funds flow to municipalities, explicitly earmarks the local government equitable share to finance free or basic services for indigent residents.
So when audit outcomes are clean it is a strong signal that the legal obligations to serve the poor are being met. You can dislike the DA, but pretending the audit regime is cosmetic is at best uninformed and at worst dishonest.
The fact that clean governance is good for all South Africans is evident in the recognition a body like the SA Property Owners Association gives with its Municipal Performance Awards. The 2025 awards honoured four DA municipalities in the Western Cape in the Best-Performing Municipalities category, namely Saldanha Bay, Swartland (jointly first place), Swellendam (second) and Hessequa (third) with Cape Town being recognised as the best metropolitan municipality.
Auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke has pushed back against this new political slogan of treating clean audits as box-ticking, taking issue with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s “unhelpful posture” on clean audits and saying they are fundamental to good governance.
The consensus outside some party politics and opinion pages is unanimous that financials are fundamental to good governance. To argue otherwise is performative politics at its easiest — namely loud, cost-free and allergic to facts.
It is quite bizarre how some hold the DA to impossible standards (as if clean audits are not good enough), and the ANC to none. But fortunately citizens don’t live in think-pieces. They live with pipes, cables and buses. If you want to test a government’s sincerity, look there.
Cape Town’s pro-poor spending
Here is what pro-poor spending by a DA government looks like in Cape Town. Over the next three years the city will spend a record R40bn on infrastructure. Three quarters of that is directed to lower-income households. Unlike all of the ANC’s plans, these aren’t grand promises on paper but appropriated money moving through tenders, purchase orders and site instructions, right now.
About 40% of the capital plan is water and sanitation. The city is replacing 100km of sewer and 50km of water mains every year, across the metro. There’s a completed R4bn upgrade at Zandvliet, servicing Khayelitsha and beyond. The Cape Flats bulk sewer upgrade, the largest of its kind in SA, is advancing and will benefit more than 300,000 households.
None of this fits the narrative the “transformationist” commentary class prefers, which treats actual work as distractions from “real” change. Sustained investment in this type of infrastructure is typically why people move to Cape Town to escape the ANC dysfunction elsewhere.
Turning to transport, the single biggest public transport project by any city in the country is underway in Cape Town: the MyCiTi link from Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain to Wynberg and Claremont. It’s multi-year, multi-billion rand, and aimed at cutting the brutal time tax that apartheid planning still extracts from the poorest workers. It will sit alongside the N2 Express and add to the existing MyCiTi network from Atlantis into the inner city.
Alongside this, the city is investing several billion in roads, resurfacing, congestion relief and the basic repairs commuters actually feel, like a pothole that is fixed before it becomes a crater like those seen in Johannesburg.
Then there’s safety, one of the top concerns of Capetonians. Since 2021 the number of operational SA Police Service officers active in the city has declined by about 15%, from 8,668 officers to only 7,355 in 2025. This is a reduction of more than 1,300 police.
Over the same period Cape Town’s own enforcement capacity has expanded significantly to compensate. The city’s Law Enforcement Advancement Plan has grown by 121%, and the Metro Police Service by 93%.
Hundreds of new municipal police officers are going out onto the streets. Neighbourhood policing teams are being built in every ward. A growing technology stack is helping responders move faster and with better information. And the city keeps pushing for the devolution of key investigative powers so that local officers can build prosecution-ready dockets on gang, gun and drug crimes.
Visible housing pipeline
On housing, the hardest test of all, the city has released more well-located land in the last two years than in the decade before. The pipeline for affordable and social housing near the CBD and other economic nodes stands at roughly 12,000 units. The work is real, the pipeline is visible, and it’s accelerating rather than shrinking (as is the case where the ANC governs).
If people want to find fault in Cape Town they can. Any honest government will admit where it fails, and the DA does. Governing is messy but that’s not an excuse where the DA governs. However, the purity tests that thrive on social media and the writings of the intelligentsia is of little actual value for the lived experience of South Africans.
Most importantly, the consequences of failed audits is certain: a city with dirty books will not serve the poor. Corruption and chaos are regressive taxes. They fall heaviest on those with the least margin for error. That’s why audit outcomes matter and why the argument that clean audits don’t translate to pro-poor programmes is not a serious way to discuss the problems SA faces.
It is unhelpful to judge the ANC on its promises but never on its performance, while judging the DA against made-up and constantly shifting standards. Both should be judged on outcomes ordinary people can see and touch.
• Eloff, a writer and nonprofit executive, is a legal adviser to the mayor of Cape Town. He writes in his personal capacity.
