GOOD Speech delivered during the City of Johannesburg Council Meeting by Matthew Cook, GOOD National Chairperson & City of Johannesburg Councillor:
Speaker, Executive Mayor, Deputy Executive Mayor and MMC of Finance, colleagues, Johannesburg deserves a budget rooted in honesty and yesterday, we heard an administration admit the scale of the crisis facing our city.
We heard acknowledgements of collapsing infrastructure, unsustainable debt, water losses nearing 45%, electricity losses of 27%, a R220 billion infrastructure backlog, political instability, governance failures, and years of deferred maintenance.
That honesty matters because you cannot repair a city if you first refuse to tell the truth about it.
But Speaker, honesty alone is not enough. Residents do not live inside speeches. They live inside the daily reality of Johannesburg and that reality remains one of frustration, decay, anxiety, and exhaustion.
GOOD understands that a mother in Riverlea does not experience Johannesburg through a budget document, she experiences it when the taps run dry for days. Likewise, a small business owner in the inner city does not feel the slogan “investment today, securing tomorrow” when electricity failures destroy stock and customers stop coming. GOOD also knows that residents in Eldorado Park do not care about frameworks and reform pillars when refuse is not collected and illegal dumping grows around schools and homes.
Speaker, the problem with this budget is not what it says. We have had turnaround strategies, war rooms and recovery plans. We have had inner city strategies, financial sustainability frameworks and service delivery interventions, but residents are still asking a simple question; “When will we actually feel the results?”
Speaker, the MMC says Johannesburg is not a failed city, but a city under pressure.
That is true but the pressure is no longer temporary. It is becoming permanent and residents are being forced to carry that burden every single day.
Speaker, there are however many areas in this budget worth supporting.
The focus on infrastructure maintenance is correct.
The emphasis on revenue collection reform is necessary.
The recognition that cross-subsidisation is becoming unsustainable is overdue.
Speaker, the MMC’s speech repeatedly references “building Johannesburg together” and I must commend yourself and the GLU partners for implementing such a robust and extensive IDP Programme.
I co-chaired 4 of these sessions and was so proud of the Executive and Deputy Executive Mayors, MMC’s, Chairpersons and councillors who participated regularly throughout these sessions.
Speaker, I know that you will have political parties in this chamber complaining and moaning and criticizing the IDP process, BUT Speaker under the Democratic Alliance led City of Cape Town, there is no such IDP public participation.
Under the Democratic Alliance in Cape Town, the IDP is positioned as an outcome of the budget process, allowing ward councillors to use R250k their ward budget allocations for Christmas lights in posh suburbs, while the residents of Dunoon, Khayalitsha, Langa and Mitchells Plain have to fend for themselves when the floods and fire seasons start.
Accountability and transparency in government is important Madam Speaker, and that is why when I woke up this morning, I was excited to come here to this beautiful chamber to discuss council matters with councilllors, residents and the media all present in one space.
Yes speaker, we have our challenges in this house, but here we sit in the council chamber conducting our meetings despite that the rest of our Civic Centre has been deemed unusable. Speaker, the Civic Centre didn’t decline overnight. It happened over years of neglect under the Democratic Alliance’s “special projects” Mayors Mashaba and Phalatse.
You see Speaker, despite our civic centre being unusable, the GLU government understands the importance of in person council meetings. National Parliament too understands the importance of in person accountability and that’s why when the tragic fire at Parliament happened a few years ago, arrangements were quickly made for an alternative meeting space.
Yet, under the Democratic Alliance in Cape Town, where there is absolutely nothing wrong with their council chamber, yet they’ve failed to meet physically for over a year.
The Cape Town chamber sit’s empty on Council days. Opposition councillors are muted or kicked out of the online meetings without explanation and Cape Town’s Mayor connects from his phone (with intermittent signal) while he parades around the country on an election campaign. At least in Joburg, our Mayor is here, in the chamber, with us.
Speaker, this is the final budget before the 2026 local government elections and so the real question is not whether the administration has identified the problems as most residents already know the problems intimately.
The real question is what will this administration do with the little time it has left?
Five months in politics is not a long time, but it is enough time to leave either a legacy of urgency or a legacy of excuses, and I hope that this GLU leaves a legacy of urgency.
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Fun South African Fact: South Africa’s natural and human fossil history dates back hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. Early dinosaur fossils have been discovered in the Western Cape and up to 80% of mammalian fossils found so far have been discovered in the Karoo.