City of Cape Town tables ‘Invested in Hope’ Budget to opposition doubt

With the 2 May 2025 deadline looming for public comment on the City of Cape Town’s draft 2025/2026 Budget, organisations and political parties have added their voices to the “Budget of Hope”. 

“For the poor, it’s a budget of hope,” said Sandra Dickson, a member of the Stop Coct, a lobby group that aims to keep accountability around the City’s affairs. 

Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis tabled the draft budget during a dramatic council sitting on Thursday 27 March in which African National Congress (ANC) caucus leader Banele Majingo revealed he had resigned from his party to join the Democratic Alliance. 

Read more: Cape Town politics shift: ANC’s Banele Majingo joins DA, foiling no confidence motion

On Friday, Dickson confirmed the lobby group would be attending public hearings and writing submissions around the Budget, which Hill-Lewis described as an “Invested in Hope” Budget.

Dickson told Daily Maverick: “For the poor, it’s a budget of hope,” but for those who did not fall into indigent categories or were working class, it was a budget of despair over increases in levies this year. 

At the time, Hill-Lewis said the Budget was so named because at this point, “We are fully invested in building a city of hope for all.”

The Budget, according to Hill-Lewis, was a “tricky balancing act”. The mayor said: “You need to find a balance between the limitations on your sources of funding — in our case, rates, tariffs, grants, borrowing and other revenue we collect — and the necessary investments needed for a fast-growing city like Cape Town, which is about to cross the five million mark to become our country’s most populous city… You also need to find a balance between the many competing priorities in the city, many of which make convincing and competing cases for increased funding.” 

The mayor added: “In the case of our city, the biggest balancing act is between our bold plans to build the Cape Town of the future — the city that we know will be able to handle the substantial growth that is headed our way — and the need to shield our most vulnerable residents from the enormous financial pressures that make their daily lives very hard.” 

Hill-Lewis then said: “And we remain committed to doing so with the utmost respect and understanding for our ratepayers,who are all experiencing their own pressures in balancing their own household budgets every month.”

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