MEDIA STATEMENT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The People’s Movement for Change has taken note of Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’ final address to Council, in which he presented the past five years of Democratic Alliance government as a success story and once again proclaimed Cape Town to be South Africa’s “City of Hope.”

The PMC has one simple question:

Hope for whom, Mayor Hill-Lewis?

We will not insult the intelligence of Cape Town residents by pretending that nothing has been achieved in this city. Infrastructure has been built. Investment has taken place. Projects have been delivered.

Good governance requires us to acknowledge that, but good politics also requires us to tell the whole truth.

A city cannot measure its success only by how much money it spends, how many projects it announces, or how impressive its statistics appear from the podium of the Council Chamber.

The true audit of a government is the lived experience of its people.

Mayor Hill-Lewis speaks of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

PMC asks: What kind of jobs? Who received those opportunities? How many families remain trapped in unemployment, temporary work and economic insecurity despite living in this so-called City of Hope?

He speaks proudly about record infrastructure investment.

PMC asks: Can the mother raising her children in an informal settlement see that record investment when winter rain enters her home? Can the family sharing inadequate sanitation feel it? Can communities living with failing infrastructure, overcrowding and years of housing uncertainty recognise themselves in the Cape Town described in yesterday’s speech?

He speaks about affordable housing and land released for development, but thousands of Capetonians do not experience housing as an achievement.

• They experience it as a waiting list.
• They experience overcrowding.
• They experience backyard structures.
• They experience informal settlements.
• They experience another year passing while being told that their opportunity will come.

And this exposes the fundamental problem with the DA’s Cape Town narrative:

Cape Town can look exceptional in a spreadsheet while inequality remains painfully visible from one community to the next.

Drive through this city. Do not stop where the postcards are taken. Drive deeper, through the communities where parents are frightened about whether their children will return home safely.

Speak to the pensioner counting every rand before purchasing electricity, speak to the unemployed young person who has sent application after application without receiving an opportunity, speak to families who have waited years for dignified housing, speak to residents who feel that the quality of municipal government they receive depends far too heavily on which side of Cape Town they were born on.

They are Cape Town too.

That is why PMC rejects the politics of presenting municipal expenditure as though expenditure itself is transformation.

R12 billion spent means very little to a forgotten community if billions pass through the books while inequality passes from one generation to another.

A budget is not a trophy.

Infrastructure expenditure is not a favour.

Municipal services are not gifts from a political party.

They are what residents pay government to deliver.

And when government asks voters for another five years, citizens have every right to ask not only “What did you spend?”, but:

“What changed in my life?”

The People’s Movement for Change believes Cape Town deserves a more ambitious definition of good governance.

• Clean audits matter.

• Investment matters.

• Infrastructure matters.

• Economic growth matters.

But people must matter most.

The measure of Cape Town’s success cannot be how beautiful its best communities have become. It must also be how rapidly we are closing the distance between its best-served and its most neglected communities.

We cannot celebrate one Cape Town while another Cape Town continues waiting outside the gates of opportunity, and we refuse to accept that inequality is simply the unavoidable price of running a successful city.

Mayor Hill-Lewis has effectively placed the DA’s record before the electorate.

We welcome that debate, but then let us debate the entire record.

Let us interrogate the jobs numbers, let us interrogate housing delivery, let us interrogate affordability, let us interrogate spatial inequality, let us interrogate service delivery community by community, let us ask where the money was spent, who benefited, who is still waiting and — most importantly — why they are still waiting after years of DA government.

Because the 2026 Local Government Elections cannot become a competition between political parties over who produces the most impressive statistics.

It must become a referendum on whether ordinary people can actually feel government working in their lives.

The PMC does not want to govern Cape Town merely because we believe another political party has failed.

We want to change what government considers success.

Success is when a child’s postcode no longer determines the quality of opportunity available to them.

Success is when dignity is not determined by income.

Success is when development reaches communities that have spent decades watching prosperity happen somewhere else.

Success is when government sees people not as voting blocs, statistics or beneficiaries — but as citizens entitled to dignity.

So when Mayor Hill-Lewis calls Cape Town the “City of Hope,” PMC’s response is simple:

Hope cannot belong to some.

Hope cannot stop at the boundary of an affluent suburb.

Hope cannot exist only in budgets, speeches and election slogans.

Hope must reach the backyard dweller.

Hope must reach the unemployed graduate.

Hope must reach the pensioner.

Hope must reach the informal settlement.

Hope must reach the Cape Flats.

Hope must reach every forgotten street and every forgotten family.

Otherwise it is not a City of Hope.

It is a city of two realities.

And on 4 November 2026, the people of Cape Town will have the opportunity to decide whether those two realities should continue for another five years.

The People’s Movement for Change believes Cape Town can do better.

Not a Cape Town for some.

A Cape Town for all.

ENDS

Issued by:

Anco Barker
Office of the National Head of Communications
People’s Movement for Change (PMC)