During a particularly prickly moment in a Cape Town election debate broadcast on Tuesday, Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson let slip that the city owned 24,000 parcels of land. Only about half of these were vacant, he quickly added: “Yes, we have been reluctant to make that public because we know there are many parties that want to organise land invasions… As and when we are in a position to release this (information), we’ll make it known”. This revelation during the Cape Talk radio debate did not go down well with opposition parties in the metro, where the governing DA is pitching its account of being the best-run in the country against the narrative of Cape Town as the most unequal. By MARIANNE MERTEN.

Housing, alongside the location of affordable housing and related sanitation and water provision, is central in the clash of narratives in Cape Town, and not only during these times of electioneering. The most recent and widely accepted statistics from the Human Science Resource Council (HSRC) put the city’s housing backlog at between 360,000 and 400,000 units.

And so it was no surprise that the Economic Freedom Fighters, who espouse expropriation of land without compensation, grumbled at Neilson’s disclosure. Nor that the ANC disagreed: on the campaign trail the message from the party, which finds itself in opposition in Cape Town and the Western Cape, has been that the DA-governed city allocates resources to the leafy, largely white suburbs in a replication of apartheid spatial separation.

It was the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) that neatly summed up why Neilson’s disclosure grates: if the DA did not release the information on the land parcels, the perception continued “that they and the property developers are in cahoots and only certain properties are released to certain property developers”, said Grant Haskin, the party’s communications director and one-time councillor.

The Deputy Mayor was on a sticky wicket.

His explanation that the land parcels in town were too small for affordable housing did not wash with fellow debaters. Tony Ehrenreich, who led the ANC’s 2011 municipal election campaign and stayed on as councillor, retorted that the vacant land had never been considered too small to sell to private developers to build housing for the rich. The heart of the matter was equity transfer and bringing the working class close to jobs and good education, which are in town. “If you don’t get that into your head, we don’t have a city for everyone,” he added.

And EFF Western Cape chairman Bernard Joseph highlighted a series of examples across the Cape Flats where housing simply wasn’t up to scratch, be it from kitchens often only “separated by a half wall from the toilet” to title deeds being handed out to people who shouldn’t have got them.

Neilson acknowledged that the DA council provided only 7,000 housing opportunities in the past year. It wasn’t the land, it was the budget, he said, saying the ANC-led national government had a constitutional duty to make housing provision possible. “We have not been given the resources… We require significant funding from national government to do that.”

In the discussion on crime, gangsterism and drugs, it was again the ANC-led government in charge of the SAPS fingered for Cape Town’s state of insecurity as the metro police represented only 3% of available policing power.

It was a case of claiming where delivery takes place, but putting the blame for non-delivery elsewhere, preferably the ANC. Or else numbers are used to dazzle, or obfuscate, depending on the political lens.

Claiming victories in Cape Town’s governance is central to the DA crafting its political success story since taking over in 2006 under mayor Helen Zille, in charge of a coalition of seven parties. This DA story also cites successive clean bills of financial health from the Auditor-General and Statistics South Africa indicators showing the city is among the country’s highest for access to basic services.

As Cape Town’s DA Mayor Patricia de Lille criss-crossed the city, its townships and the Cape Flats in recent weeks it is that track record that is highlighted. As recently as last weekend she told supporters to vote for the party to ensure further progress.

“When we started campaigning for this election in Cape Town, we said we want to continue building this city on our five pillars: the opportunity city, the safe city, the caring city, the inclusive city and the well-run city. We said that we have made progress, but that we have more to do. We can only keep making progress with your vote for the DA,” De Lille said at the DA’s Inkqubela Progress rally in Khayelitsha.

The DA mayor is on public record that come the 3 August election day she wants her party to clinch more than the just over 60% polling support obtained in the 2011 municipal vote.

But it hasn’t always been this rosy. In 2006 the DA had won just 41.85% of the vote, but it outmanoeuvred the ANC, which only lagged some four percentage points behind, to form the then city government. And so the ANC found itself in the opposition benches, an uncomfortable place for the party, which governs all of the seven other metros.

When Zille moved to the premier’s office after the 2009 elections, council and provincial power mutually reinforced that storyline of delivery. And in the 2011 local government elections the DA won 60.92% of the vote. The ANC, already wracked by factional infighting, continued to unravel and saw its support drop by just over 5% to 32.8%.

On the numbers front, Neilson nimbly hauled out the statistics and figures. He dismissed as “comparing apples to pears” a report by Africa Check, the non-profit organisation promoting accuracy in public debate, that had dismissed as incorrect the DA’s claim that it spent 67% of its budget in poor areas, when its spending stood at 49%. The Deputy Mayor maintained that of the council’s total R33-billion budget, R17.5-billion was spent in direct expenditure on poor areas. This rose to R26-billion if the total amount including indirect spending was considered.

But while Neilson during Tuesday’s Cape Talk Cape Town election debate cited service provision as a top priority, the city’s 2014/15 integrated annual report counts providing 3,091 “sanitation service points”, its jargon for toilets, and 948 “water service points”, or taps, as a success. The provisioning had exceeded the target of 2,800 toilets and 800 taps for that year.

What happens when four politicians are put in a room to discuss the local government elections? Away from the hype of rallies, or the handing out of T-shirts on the door-to-door campaign trail, they are forced to engage on numbers – both rands and cents and deliverables – policies and their take on the daily realities of citizens.

But what would a debate be with out a closing statement – and opportunity for some easy electioneering rhetoric? And so the EFF promised it would, as Joseph put it, “definitely ensure that we make a radical change to society… People in authority in the city are not serious”, while the ACDP welcomed being part of the city administration, as Haskin said, “the DA has abused its power”. On behalf of the ANC, Ehrenreich said: “The city is not working for everybody… We need to address our differences together.” But for the DA Neilson argued that as the ANC had broken Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay, “we appeal to the voters of Cape Town not to give the ANC the opportunity to come break Cape Town”.

In two weeks’ time, voters can choose what narrative to believe. DM

Photo of Cape Town by Neville Nel, via Flickr