GOOD Statement by Axolile Notywala, GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor:
The GOOD Party has formally declared its opposition to the City of Cape Town’s decision to auction off approximately 50 public properties, including the historic Good Hope Centre. This move represents a betrayal of the city’s constitutional obligation to address spatial justice and provide well-located housing for its residents.
The City’s decision to sell these assets to the highest bidder, rather than utilising them for the public good, is a short-sighted financial move that permanently strips Cape Town of the tools needed to dismantle the legacy of spatial apartheid.
The GOOD Party highlights a disturbing contradiction in the City’s management of the Good Hope Centre. While the building is being prepared for auction, public funds have recently been spent on maintenance, including fixing roof leaks and ensuring the facility was compliant for the recent Opening of Parliament.
Public land is a strategic instrument for spatial justice, not a disposable asset, says Axolile Notywala, GOOD Party Councillor. Using taxpayer money to refurbish a building only to hand it over to the private sector is not just exclusionary; it is fiscally irrational. This facility is functional and vital to the city’s public identity.
With over 400,000 households on the housing waiting list, the GOOD Party argues that strategic inner-city land must be reserved for mixed-income and social housing. Selling central land purely for commercial development forces the poor to the periphery, entrenching inequality and increasing transport costs for the working class. True economic growth is not measured by the construction of luxury apartments, but by how many residents can afford to live near economic nodes.
If the auction proceeds, the matter does not end there.
There are further legal options, continued council oversight, policy proposals to more strictly regulate future alienations, and ongoing public mobilisation.
Public land is a scarce resource. Once it is sold, the loss is permanent. That is why every alienation must be tested against a simple question: does it truly serve the long-term interests of residents?
Cities are not measured only by how much they develop, but by who they include.
Cape Town must decide whether it will use its strategic land to correct inequality or sell it and lose that opportunity forever.
There’s something bigger sitting underneath this entire debate: who owns the future shape of a city? The highest bidder or the public that lives in it? That’s the real contest here.
GOOD Ministerial Role: Patricia de Lille serves as the Minister of Tourism in the national government.
Sun Runner
France: You have two cows. You kill them, throw away everything except the filet mignon, and make cheese with the leftover Pasteurized milk.
mirage
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.