By Chris van Gass

The African National Congress (ANC)-controlled Western Cape government could come down hard on the Democratic Alliance (DA)-led Cape Town city council for scoring an “unacceptable” average in the review of its integrated development plan (IDP), Richard Dyantyi, provincial MEC for housing said.

Dyantyi said the city’s performance on the plan, a “rigorous” analysis of socioeconomic trends that identified “key drivers of development and underdevelopment”, had been compared with cities such as Johannesburg where it scored much worse in certain areas. Its performance was “very average”.

Dyantyi released the ratings of the review and criticised Cape Town, as an A-grade municipality, for performing worse than in the previous IDP, conducted while the ANC controlled the city.

The issues the city had failed to impress him on included: the lack of improved economic productivity, the lack of “inclusive” participation by citizens in the process, falling down on creating “integrated human settlements and dealing with the legacy of informal settlements”, and questions about the “stability in its revenue and expenditure”.

He said the city had met only minimum requirements. It was worrying that in the public participation process only 7000 people had participated in a city of 3-million people.

The city needed to move on such aspects and the IDP more broadly as the city represented 75% of the population in the province and benefited from 70% of the provincial budget.

Dyantyi rejected suggestions that his report card was biased because Cape Town was being compared with other municipalities where the ANC ruled. He said the process, while rigorous, had been independent and fair.

He said the intention of the review was not to punish anyone, but ensure the best outcome for the future running of municipalities.

Dyantyi said an example of the action he could take if the city did not respond to his concerns within 30 days was to withhold funds — for say housing. The province would then take over that function from the city to provide the services.

Mayoral committee member for corporate services Belinda Walker, of the DA, said Dyantyi had not appeared to have read the council’s submissions.

He “did not seem to realise” that legislation intended the IDP to be a high-level or “overview” document only and it was not intended to contain the municipality’s full business plan.

Although the plans of different spheres of government should not interfere with each other, “the MEC seems to be saying that the city of Cape Town must adopt ANC economic policy, even though it is not run by the ANC”, Walker said.

She said Dyantyi’s role was to find out whether Cape Town’s IDP was legally compliant and “not to critique it in terms of his political party’s ideologies”.

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