Firstly, an appeal. We are completely reliant on Crowd Funding to cover our legal costs. If everyone who signed this petition was willing to donate R20 (or $1), we would be able to fight our court battle on an even footing. So, please help us fund our legal costs by making a donation – for whatever amount you can - at our fundraising site. Donors outside of South Africa might find it easier to donate via our BackaBuddy site.

Secondly, money is what the developers and their allies have plenty of and it enables them to wage lawfare against us by dragging us to the Appeal Court. The City of Cape Town has unfettered access to rates which it has used previously to embark on ill-planned legal action. For example, in 2021 the courts slammed the City for barring human rights monitors access to the City’s Strandfontein camp for homeless persons during the Covid pandemic’s Level 5 lockdown in 2020, but then the City proceeded to appeal, only to withdraw the appeal at the last minute, an action described as a frivolous waste of millions of Rands. Note that in 2020, the Auditor-General (AG) found that the City had procured legal services for several years through a process which was not compliant the AG’s supply chain management regulations.

Yet, while the City is quick to spend money opposing citizen’s seeking to exercise their rights, the City is also expert at hiding its money transactions. This month, they released their draft 2022/23 budget. Strangely, you will not find the hidden transactions costs relating to the River Club anywhere in that budget. As pointed out astutely by an Observatory resident, Rob Ketteringham, in his comments to the City in response to the budget, the City's Transport Department has commissioned and decided the specifications for the extension of Berkeley Road, a key element of the River Club project that is touted as contributing to needed urban infrastructure. The River Club developers are footing the contractor's bills in exchange for the City giving them extremely valuable property rights. Yet the City does not record an income for the sale of these property rights in its budget, nor does it record a separate line item showing the same amount being spent on the capital expenditure to build the road.

In fact, the budget, as it currently stands, hides the values of these two transactions, so that taxpayers cannot tell if the city has undervalued the property rights it has granted, or, conversely, if it is being overcharged for frivolous road building. That’s a case of transactions being hidden under the table. As Rob points out, if one’s neighbour gifts you a car of your specific choosing in exchange for you rebuilding his roof, the South African Revenue Services expect those amounts to be declared and would not be happy with a pretence that "no cash changed hands, therefore I didn't need to declare the transaction as income".

This phenomenon is well documented in Crispin Olver’s book on Cape Town, A House Divided, where he points out that “the remarkable feature of regulatory approvals for property development is that they create enormous value for the developer without any financial transfer from the City. Value is created at a distance, and because there is no direct financial transfer, auditors don’t easily pick this up.” Given that Olver’s informants had also noted that “many mayors in Cape Town had close ties with the business and property class as well as property developers and tended to act in their overall interests”, Olver comes back to the point that the money is what matters, whether to individual officials able to bend rules for developers, to the administration as a whole wanting a development to be approved, or for a political party whose coffers might be suitably rewarded if a controversial development is smoothed through.

We don’t expect the City to be transparent about these matters. For example, as Rob alerted us, the City budget presents the R 10.4 million expenditure on the upgrading Berkley Road to a dual roadway from the M5 to Prestige Drive/Jan Smuts Drive in Ndabeni as being to “support the Two Rivers Urban Park development.” That is untrue and mindboggling. It is, in fact, ratepayers’ contributions to a private property development at the River Club which will lead to the disfiguring of a key and iconic part of the Two Rivers area at the confluence of the Liesbeek and Black Rivers. Given that the City has gifted 10 ha of City land (37% of the footprint of the full development) to enable the River Club development to be implemented, this is yet another example of the public subsidy of a private development – a development driven on the basis of a 9% annual return on investment to the private entities underwriting this inappropriate project.

So, follow the money and you will find the answers as to why this was approved.

You will find more information on the campaign at our website.   Follow the Liesbeek Action Campaign on twitter: @LiesbeekAction.

Make the Liesbeek Matter!