Hope Springs – Cape Town is choosing progress and South Africa can too

It is easy to feel hopeless as a South African.

When we entered office just one year ago, Cape Town’s mayoral committee and I knew that we were taking on a profound responsibility of historical proportions. We were faced with an energy crisis, high unemployment, out-of-control crime and a range of other problems brought on by the failure of the South African state. It was our calling, we felt, to show that problems can be solved and that South Africa can work.

This is what we have set out to do in Cape Town: to manage our city efficiently and effectively such that those who live here can be hopeful about the future. Cape Town can and must work. Capetonians can and must feel like there are opportunities here for them to succeed and prosper.

I realise this sounds like something easy to put on paper but difficult to achieve in reality. Reflecting on one year in office, however, has brought about some realisations that make me feel more optimistic than ever.

While South Africa’s problems are numerous, big and seemingly intractable, most of them have easy solutions. For the most part, they are caused by deliberate policy choices rather than circumstances outside of the state’s control. While frustrating, this makes the solutions more obvious.

Take the energy crisis, for example. Eskom was named the best power utility in the world at the Financial Times’ Global Energy Awards in New York in 2001. Three policy design choices were made thereafter, which have led to Eskom’s decline into chaos and ineffectiveness in just 20 years.

First is the underinvestment in new infrastructure, which has left the country reliant on an ageing coal-fired generation fleet, large sections of which are reaching end-of-life. Second, procurement policies overvalue irrelevant considerations (like race) and undervalue the effectiveness of contracts to actually deliver goods and services to the utility. Finally, for similar reasons, Eskom is facing a dire skills shortage which has drastically diminished its capacity to maintain its infrastructure.

This is, of course, on top of the endemic corruption that has exacerbated each of these problems. Again, it was a choice to allow corruption to develop and flourish unchecked.

In Cape Town, we have chosen to do things differently. Keeping with the theme of energy, we have chosen to start becoming independent of Eskom. We are at an advanced stage of procuring 300MW from independent power producers and have enabled businesses who produce excess energy with generation installations at their premises to sell all of this excess back to the City. Next year, we will procure even more generation capacity (as well as storage) through our dispatchable power tender.

We are on track to offer four or more stages’ worth of load shedding protection to residents by the end of our term in office. This extends the protection already offered by our Steenbras hydroelectric plant, which we have chosen to excellently maintain. Frustratingly, this timeframe could be shortened if the national government were to choose to exempt the City from onerous procurement procedures and other legislative requirements which serve only to prolong the process. I made the case for this exemption (along with a range of other simple interventions to solve the power crisis) in July.

It is not only on load shedding that Cape Town is making smarter decisions to solve national problems.

Faced with the reality of a failing South African Police Service due to ongoing mismanagement at a national level, we budgeted a record R5.4-billion this year to make our city safer. We have deployed 1,200 new Law Enforcement officers to crime hotspots, who have already made 8,500 arrests and helped to bring murder rates down. We have also deployed 100 more officers to the CBD to address increasing crime in this economically crucial area.

We have chosen to advocate for the devolution of more crime-fighting power to our excellent local policing services so that we can support the many hard-working SAPS officers in Cape Town. If we are able to properly gather intelligence, investigate and prepare cases for prosecution, crime will come down in Cape Town even more.

Tenants to owners

Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says the City is on track to offer four or more stages’ worth of protection from rolling blackouts. (Photo: Leila Dougan)