Andre

@GoodDoctorDre

Stanford University ‘13. ⛳️

Cape Town, South Africa

Joined November 2016

465 Following

143 Followers

1.7K Posts

Andre @GoodDoctorDre

about 8 hours ago

@mycarguyza @Recon1_ZA None of that 30M had anything to do with the team - it was purely for government-orientated activities. Bloody waste!

GoodDoctorDre retweeted

SiriusB

@SiriusBShaman

5 months ago

THE RATES THEFT How The City Of Cape Town Dispossesses Its Residents Using A Number It Invented There is a retired schoolteacher in Constantia who bought her house in 1997 for R310,000. She paid it off. Every instalment. The deed is in her name. The bond is settled. That house belongs to her. There is a pensioner in Simon's Town who bought in the early eighties when the naval town was quiet and affordable. He raised his children there. Buried his wife from that house. His grandchildren know every crack in that stoep. There is a couple in Fish Hoek who bought in 1988. They scrimped through interest rates that hit 25 percent. They paid the bond twice over in interest alone. They battled and bled for that house. There is a man in Camps Bay who bought a modest flat in the late seventies when Camps Bay was a fishing village, not a playground for European tourists. He watched the world change around him. His flat did not change. Only the number on a spreadsheet changed. There is a widow in Noordhoek. A family in Woodstock. A grandmother in Muizenberg. A retired engineer in Newlands. A former nurse in Rondebosch. A couple in Claremont who bought before their children were born and whose children now have children of their own. Every one of them paid for their homes. Fully. Completely. They owe nothing. The City of Cape Town disagrees. The City of Cape Town has decided what each of these houses is worth. Not based on what was paid. Not based on what the owner received. Not based on any transaction that actually occurred. A Computer-Assisted Mass Appraisal system looked at nearby sales, typed a number into a database, and that number now determines what each of these people owes the city every month for the remainder of their lives. Their rates were manageable a decade ago. Then the valuation rolls updated. And updated again. And the rates followed the valuations upward, 20 to 30 percent per year, compounding, relentless, with no cap and no ceiling and no mechanism that any resident can invoke to stop it. At 25 percent annual increases, rates of R10,000 a month become R30,000 within five years. R360,000 a year. For a house already owned. On land already paid for. These people are in their sixties. Their seventies. Their eighties. This is not taxation. This is eviction by spreadsheet. THE EMPEROR AND HIS SUBJECTS Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has a particular way of describing the people who object to this. He calls the legal challenge by SAPOA an attack on Cape Town's pro-poor budget by the country's wealthiest property owners. He frames the dispute as rich against poor, as though the pensioner in Fish Hoek who paid off a modest bond over thirty years is in the same category as a billionaire property fund. His exact framing: the City simply cannot agree that wealthy property owners should be charged the same as lower-income or middle-class households. This would be regressive. Let us examine the logic. A retired nurse in Rondebosch who bought her house in 1990 for R180,000 is now sitting on a property the City values at R8 million because developers built luxury apartments down the road. She did not build luxury apartments. She did not sell anything. She did not receive R8 million. She receives a pension. And the mayor of Cape Town calls her a wealthy property owner and increases her rates by 25 percent because the number on his spreadsheet went up. That is not progressive taxation. That is taxing a fictional gain that the owner never received, cannot access without selling her home, and never agreed to. It is the financial equivalent of charging someone for a meal they did not order, in a restaurant they did not enter, at a price they did not agree to, and then calling them wealthy because the menu is expensive. The Good Party's Brett Herron put it precisely: the mayor's attempt to paint critics as enemies of the poor is disingenuous and misleading. This budget is not redistributive. It is punitive and increasingly unaffordable for working and middle-class families. But the mayor does not hear this. The mayor hears fourteen thousand objections and responds by calling the objectors wealthy. The mayor hears SAPOA, AfriForum, 59 ratepayers' associations, the Good Party, and STOP CoCT all saying the same thing and responds by telling them they should pay more. This is not governance. This is a man who believes the residents of Cape Town are his subjects. Cash cows to be milked at his discretion, to fund his budget, at rates he sets, based on values he determines, reviewed by boards he appoints, with no ceiling he is obligated to respect. When the court asked his counsel during the December 2025 hearing whether there is any legislative requirement for the City to tighten its belt before extracting more from ratepayers, the City's lawyers could not point to a single one. Not one. There is no requirement. There is no ceiling. There is no mechanism. There is only the mayor's appetite, and the ratepayer's wallet, and the distance between the two is narrowing every year. THE FICTION AT THE CENTRE Property value should never be linked to rates. Ever. This is not a negotiating position. It is a statement of material fact. No municipal service the City of Cape Town provides scales with property value. Refuse collection. Same truck. Same bin. Same route. Whether a house is valued at R500,000 or R50 million. A private refuse contractor would do this for R500 a month per household and show up on time. Road maintenance. The tar does not consult the valuation roll. The pothole does not check whether the adjacent house is worth R2 million or R20 million. A community-funded road maintenance agreement would cost a fraction of what the City extracts. Street lighting. Same voltage. Same bulb. Same darkness it pushes back. The photons do not charge premium rates in Constantia. Verge maintenance. Every suburb in Cape Town could privatise verge cleaning, garden maintenance, and public space upkeep for less than a quarter of the rates currently charged. Private companies competing for contracts deliver better service at lower cost because they are accountable to the people paying them, not to a R84.1 billion bureaucracy that answers to no one. Security. A private neighbourhood security patrol costs R500 to R1,500 per household per month and provides armed response, visible patrolling, and direct accountability. The City charges multiples of this embedded in the rates bill and delivers a murder rate of 68 per 100,000. We will address this in detail. Sewage processing. We will address this too. Not one service scales with property value. Not one. The link is artificial. It was designed for one purpose: to maximise extraction from residents who cannot escape it because their homes are not liquid. You cannot sell a wall to pay the rates on the roof. You are trapped inside a number that a municipal algorithm generated, and the number goes up every year because the machine requires it to. If the mayor truly believes property value should determine what people pay, then let us apply the principle consistently. Let the salaries of every City official be linked to a property-value levy too. Let the city manager's R4.49 million salary be subject to a 25 percent annual increase contribution back into the rates pool. Let the executive directors pay a percentage of their R3.3 million packages into a fund that offsets rates for pensioners. Would that not be more fair? Would that not be more progressive? Of course they would never agree to that. The link only works in one direction: from the resident to the City. Never the other way. THE FEEDING TROUGH: WHERE YOUR RATES ACTUALLY GO The City of Cape Town operates on an R84.1 billion annual budget and employs a senior management structure that earns more than most of the residents it taxes. Here is the executive management team. These are the thirteen people at the top of the machine. Their salaries are funded by your rates. # Name Position Est. Monthly Salary Contract 1 Lungelo Mbandazayo City Manager R374,000+ 5 years 2 Kevin Jacoby Executive Director: Finance (CFO) R275,000+ 12 yrs 10 months (to 2035) 3 Vincent Botto Executive Director: Safety & Security R275,000+ 10 years (to 2035) 4 Ruby Gelderbloem Executive Director: Economic Growth R275,000+ 10 years (to 2032) 5 Kadri Nassiep Executive Director: Energy R275,000+ 10 years (to 2032) 6 Ernest Sass Executive Director: Corporate Services R275,000+ 6 years (to 2028) 7 Zukiswa Mandlana Executive Director: Community Services & Health R275,000+ Appointed Sept 2022 8 Leonardo Manus Executive Director: Water & Sanitation R275,000+ Appointed 9 Jason McNeil Executive Director: Urban Waste Management R275,000+ Appointed 10 Rob McGaffin Executive Director: Spatial Planning & Environment R275,000+ Appointed Sept 2022 11 Regan Melody Executive Director: Urban Mobility R275,000+ Appointed 12 Gareth Morgan Executive Director: Future Planning & Resilience R275,000+ Appointed 13 Nolwandle Gqiba Executive Director: Human Settlements R275,000+ Continuing That is thirteen people. At a conservative estimate of R275,000 per month each for the executive directors and R374,000 for the city manager, this table alone represents approximately R45 million per year in salary costs. Before car allowances. Before cellphone allowances. Before data allowances. Before risk insurance covering their personal property up to R1.5 million. Before life and disability cover at twice their package. Kevin Jacoby, the CFO, is on a contract running twelve years and ten months, ending in June 2035. Vincent Botto, heading Safety and Security, has a ten-year contract to 2035. These are not public servants on standard terms. These are entrenched positions with contracts longer than most home loans. Craig Kesson, previously an executive director, was reported to earn R3.3 million, a salary exceeding that of the President of the Republic. And then there is the Melissa Whitehead case. The City's former transport commissioner was suspended in January 2018. She sat at home on full salary, R250,000 per month, for nineteen months. Nearly R5 million in total, paid by ratepayers, to a person not working. The disciplinary hearing that lasted over a year exonerated her of all allegations of corruption and financial misconduct. Her professional integrity remained intact. She was found guilty on two charges that she described as ludicrous, relating to a bid evaluation committee process that was designed for debate. The City's response to this woman was unfathomable victimisation and bullying, her words. She sold her house to fund legal costs exceeding R2 million. She walked away. The City then tried to reclaim R400,000 from her and launched two additional disciplinary proceedings. This is how the machine treats the people inside it who do not conform. It destroys them. And the ratepayers funded every hour of that destruction at R250,000 per month. The DA approved R1.4 billion in additional staff costs in a single budget cycle. Senior officials received increases of 30 to 50 percent. The DA simultaneously opposed a smaller staff cost increase in Durban and called it exorbitant. This is where your rates go. Not to the poor. Not to service delivery. To the machine. THE SEWAGE IN YOUR OCEAN The City of Cape Town pumps more than 40 megalitres of raw, untreated sewage into the Atlantic Ocean every single day. Five million litres daily through the Camps Bay outfall alone, directly into a Marine Protected Area, adjacent to a Blue Flag beach. A Freedom Front Plus councillor described swimming at local beaches as swimming in a toilet. Independent scientists from UCT and UWC documented that 42 percent of water samples on the Table Bay coast exceeded safety limits for E. coli and enterococci. Strand Beach was labelled grossly polluted. Aerial photographs captured sewage plumes drifting back toward swimmers. Chemical-pollutant testing occurs only once every two years. Bacterial sampling every two to four weeks is too infrequent to reflect the real health risk. The City's response was not to fix the infrastructure. It was to attack the scientists. Researchers reported harassment, intimidation, and public denunciation. UCT's Professor Lesley Green documented systematic denial, interference, and misrepresentation by City officials regarding contamination data. The City estimates it needs R12 billion to fix the outfalls. It has not built them. It underspent its capital infrastructure budget by R1.6 billion in the previous financial year. The money was allocated. The work was not done. The rates went up. This is the sewage service that your property rates fund. THE SAFETY YOU'RE PAYING FOR R6.7 billion allocated to safety and security. Cape Town dominates four of the top five deadliest police precincts in South Africa. Seven of the top ten. Murder rate: 68 per 100,000. Murder increased 9.1 percent in the first quarter of 2025. Delft: 66 murders in three months. Mfuleni: 65. Philippi East: spiked from 36 to 59. The City invested millions in ShotSpotter gunfire detection technology. It did not reduce murders. It was discontinued. Paramedics now wear bulletproof vests. Over 280 attacks on paramedics in a single year. R6.7 billion. Cape Town remains among the fifty most violent cities on earth. Vincent Botto, Executive Director of Safety and Security, earns upward of R275,000 per month on a ten-year contract extending to 2035. The people of Delft and Mfuleni bury their children every week. THE CORRUPTION YOUR RATES FUND In September 2024, former DA Human Settlements MMC Malusi Booi was arrested alongside nine co-accused on charges of fraud, corruption, money laundering, and racketeering linked to housing tenders worth more than R1 billion. The State alleged Booi was part of an enterprise headed by suspected 28s gang boss Ralph Stanfield and his wife Nicole Johnson. The enterprise allegedly operated inside the City's Human Settlements directorate from 2019 to 2023, manipulating the award of at least eleven housing tenders. Booi's ex-wife allegedly received a R690,000 Rolex watch from Stanfield. Plus R20,000 cash. Stanfield's company, Glomix House Brokers, was awarded contracts after other contractors were allegedly intimidated off housing sites. Treasury blacklisted Glomix nationally for ten years. One co-accused, Abdul Kader Davids, was murdered two days after being granted bail. In May 2025, charges were provisionally withdrawn. Not because anyone was found innocent. Because new evidence required further investigation. Stanfield's wife, Nicole Johnson, bought a R5 million luxury flat in Sea Point while sitting in jail. In September 2025, police raided 26 properties across Cape Town in a separate R1.6 billion tender fraud investigation triggered by a whistleblower. Suspicions of kickbacks, inflated prices, and rigged bids across municipal contracts. In January 2025, SAPS had raided the Civic Centre itself in another R1 billion fraud probe. Three sets of high-profile corruption raids in three years. Billions in allegedly fraudulent tenders. A gang boss linked to a City councillor. Rolex watches. A co-accused murdered. R5 million flats purchased from prison. Irregular appointments in the city manager's office flagged by whistleblowers. The City manager's office accused of appointing a former clerical worker to a senior manager position without meeting requirements, then creating four additional positions for associates. Who is having lunch with whom? Who is getting what under which table? Which property developer is getting rezoning approved in exchange for what consideration? Which municipal official is living a lifestyle that their published salary cannot explain? These are not rhetorical questions. At R84.1 billion of ratepayer money, they are the most urgent questions in Cape Town. THE TRIPLE TAX Even if the City were run by saints, the structure is extortion. Income tax: up to 45 percent. VAT: 15 percent on every purchase. Corporate tax: 27 percent passed through as higher prices. Fuel levy embedded in the price of everything transported by road. Import duties. UIF. SDL. Transfer duty when you buy. Capital gains when you sell. Estate duty when you die. By the time groceries reach a kitchen table, cumulative extraction across the supply chain exceeds 60 percent. Then rates. Monthly. Forever. Linked to a fictional valuation. Then water charges linked to property value. Sanitation charges linked to property value. Refuse removal linked to property value. A new city-wide cleaning levy linked to property value. A medieval serf owed one day in three. A South African worker owes eight months of twelve. The serf had a better deal. The serf at least knew who his lord was and what the arrangement cost. You need an accountant, a tax consultant, and a financial advisor just to calculate how much of your own life you are permitted to keep. THE QUIET DISPOSSESSION In Bo-Kaap, families who survived the Group Areas Act, survived forced removals, survived apartheid itself, are being pushed out by rates bills linked to valuations inflated by the gentrification their displacement accelerates. Their heritage is the tourism product. The colourful facades draw visitors. Visitors attract developers. Developers attract capital. Capital inflates values. Values increase rates. Rates push families out. The families were the heritage. Elderly residents displaced to the Cape Flats have died within months. Separated from everything that sustained them. One family recalled: if we move out here, we are going to die. Both parents dead within a month of each other. The municipality profits at every stage. Every displaced family replaced by a wealthier buyer increases rates yield by multiples. Displacement is not a side effect. It is the function. THE COURT CASE AND ITS SHADOW Yes, it is going to court. SAPOA filed. AfriForum filed separately. The Cape Town Collective Ratepayers' Association, representing 59 ratepayers' organisations, joined as amicus curiae. The Good Party sought leave to intervene. Three days of hearings before a full bench of three senior judges in December 2025. Judgement reserved. The legal argument is clear. The City does not have the constitutional power to raise fixed charges based on property value bands. The Municipal Property Rates Act prescribes the only lawful mechanism for linking charges to property value, and the City's cleaning levy, fixed water charge, and fixed sanitation charge do not comply with it. But let us be honest. This is a city where a DA councillor was arrested alongside a 28s gang boss for R1 billion in tender fraud and the charges were provisionally withdrawn. Where police raided the Civic Centre itself. Where R1.6 billion in municipal contracts are under investigation for kickbacks. Where a co-accused was murdered two days after bail. Where a gang boss's wife buys luxury property from prison. In a city this compromised, where the lines between governance and organised crime have blurred to the point of invisibility, who is having lunch with whom before court sits? Who knows whom from which committee? Which judge has which property in which suburb subject to which valuation by which municipal assessor employed by which respondent? Fourteen thousand residents who objected to this budget are entitled to more than hope. They are entitled to a judiciary that is demonstrably, provably, structurally independent of the interests before it. We shall see. TO THE MAYOR Mr Hill-Lewis. You "earn" R4.49 million per year. Your city manager earns R4.49 million. Your executive directors earn upward of R3.3 million on contracts extending to 2035. You approved R1.4 billion in staff cost increases while telling pensioners to accept rates hikes for essential services. You paid Melissa Whitehead R250,000 a month for nineteen months to sit at home, then bullied her until she sold her house to pay her legal bills, and she was cleared of corruption. You pump 40 megalitres of raw sewage into the ocean every day. You allocate R6.7 billion to safety and deliver a murder rate of 68 per 100,000. You underspend R1.6 billion in capital infrastructure and then tell ratepayers you need more money. You link water charges to property value even though water flows through the same pipe at the same pressure regardless of what a house is worth. You introduce a cleaning levy linked to property value even though the street sweeper does not check the valuation roll before pushing his broom. You call objectors wealthy. You call the budget pro-poor. You describe the legal challenge as an attack. But the attack is yours, Mr Hill-Lewis. The attack is a rates bill that doubles every three years imposed on pensioners who have already paid for everything they own, in a city that cannot keep its sewage out of the ocean, cannot keep its residents safe, cannot account for billions in municipal contracts under criminal investigation, and cannot point to a single legal requirement to spend responsibly before extracting more. Fourteen thousand people objected. Fifty-nine ratepayers' associations. SAPOA. AfriForum. The Good Party. STOP CoCT. The Cape Town Collective Ratepayers' Association. Three senior judges heard three days of arguments. And your counsel, when asked whether you are required to tighten your belt, could not name one provision. That is not governance. That is an emperor without clothes standing in front of a mirror paid for by the people he is taxing out of their homes. TO THE PEOPLE OF CAPE TOWN You are not subjects. You are not cash cows. You are not revenue units on a municipal spreadsheet. You bought your houses. You paid for them. Many of you paid twice over through interest rates that would be criminal in any other country. You raised your families. You maintained your properties. You paid rates for decades. You paid income tax for a lifetime. You paid VAT on every purchase you ever made. You have contributed more to this economy than most of the officials setting your rates will ever earn. And they want more. They will always want more. The machine has no ceiling. No conscience. No satiation point. It sees only the number on the spreadsheet and the number goes up and the demand follows and the only way it stops is when you can no longer pay and they take your house and sell it to someone who can and the new buyer's rates reset and the cycle begins again. This is not governance. This is farming. You are the crop. Your house is the field. The rates bill is the harvest. The link between property value and rates is artificial. No service scales with value. Every service the City provides could be delivered more efficiently, more cheaply, and more accountably by private contractors or community cooperatives at a fraction of the cost. Refuse. Roads. Verges. Security. Water. Every single one. But privatisation would starve the machine. And the machine writes the policy. And the policy feeds the machine. The man in Camps Bay who bought his flat in the late seventies did not buy a revenue instrument. He bought a home. The widow in Simon's Town did not agree to fund R4.49 million salaries for life. The grandmother in Muizenberg did not consent to pay for sewage in the ocean. The couple in Fish Hoek who survived 25 percent interest rates did not battle through that to be taxed out of their house by a mayor who calls them wealthy. By what right does a municipality charge perpetual rent on property a citizen already owns, based on a value it invented, using a formula it designed to maximise its own revenue, assessed by employees it pays with the revenue the assessment generates, reviewed by a board it appoints, under a law it lobbied for, with no cap, no ceiling, and no appeal that does not feed back into the same system? There is no right. There is only power. And the exercise of that power against elderly residents on fixed incomes, in a city that pumps raw sewage into the ocean, that ranks among the most violent on earth, that is under criminal investigation for billions in tender fraud, that pays its city manager R374,000 a month, that put Melissa Whitehead on R250,000 a month for 19 months then destroyed her career after she was cleared of corruption, that gave its CFO a contract extending to 2035, that gave its safety chief a decade-long deal while presiding over 68 murders per 100,000 residents, and that cannot point to a single legal requirement to spend responsibly before extracting more. That is not governance. That is theft. And it is long past time that every resident of Constantia and Simon's Town and Fish Hoek and Camps Bay and Noordhoek and Woodstock and Bo-Kaap and Muizenberg and Newlands and Rondebosch and Claremont and Wynberg and every suburb in this city looked at that rates bill and said the same word at the same time: No!

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