While South Africa is struggling to bounce back after setbacks with its provision of electricity and other basic services, Cape Town is stepping up its game and is single-handedly soldiering on.
The City of Cape Town is set to establish a stronger independent power supply, plans on taking over the city’s commuter rail network, and focuses on ways to improve the operations of the harbour. It also aims to improve the city’s safety by adding “more than 1,000 of its own security officers” to assist the police force, “which it accuses of doing a dismal job of fighting gang violence and other crime”, reports BusinessTech.
Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis expressed surprise at how supportive the national government, led by the African National Congress (ANC), has been of the city’s efforts. Cape Town has been led by the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) since 2006.
“I would’ve expected a lot more push-back to be honest, but we haven’t experienced any,” he said in an interview in Bloomberg’s Cape Town offices on Tuesday. “The only real aggressive push-back we are getting is in the policing space, where we are so actively filling the void vacated by the slow collapse of the South African Police Service.”
Minimized reliance on Eskom
Cape Town is working on establishing its own power supply in order to decrease the city’s reliance on Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd, which are responsible for the majority of the country’s electricity. Ever since 2008, South Africa has been increasingly plagued by rolling blackouts due to Eskom’s poor management and maintenance of its power plants.
As a way to alleviate the inconvenience and economic damages caused by the blackouts, the city “initiated the process of sourcing 300 megawatts of generation capacity from private producers, likely to be mostly solar power, with contracts set to be awarded by the end of the year and the plants likely to come on line from 2026.”
The City of Cape Town plans to commission an additional 300 megawatts of capacity from “large-scale storage or other sources of power that’s available on demand”, Geordin Hill-Lewis said. But the stored power could work out costly, since it would likely come at a premium, but the new power plants are planned to supply power at prices similar to or less than Eskom.
“The long-term goal is to reduce reliance on Eskom,” the mayor said. While the city still needs to do necessary assessments of the costs of the power cuts, “I have no doubt that it would run into billions of rand,” he said.
Proposed take over from Prasa
The mayor plans for the city to take over the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa’s (Prasa) assets and infrastructure and to privatise the operations so that the renewed system can be up and running by 2026. Prasa is currently operating only about 153 train trips on an average week compared to the 444 trips in mid-2020
Mayor Hill-Lewis said that, until recently, the passenger rail system “was basic and a real belts-and-braces operation, but it worked”. He further added: “It is really hard to express how that organization has fallen apart, especially in the last decade to the extent that there is no capacity to run a train system at all.”
Other plans and challenges
The City of Cape Town is also recovering from the fallout of COVID-19 and its devastating impact on the tourism industry, one of the city’s main sources of income and employment.
“We have had kind of an elastic rebound so we are now back at about 85% of passenger numbers, so very close to pre-COVID levels,”Hill-Lewis said. He also expressed his excitement at the increase of incoming flights since the pandemic eased.
According to BusinessTech, the city’s finances are looking good, with low levels of debt and a capable civil service. However, the city is struggling to keep up with population growth and admittedly hasn’t invested sufficiently in infrastructure. Homelessness is also a big challenge and the city is investing more resources to help people off the streets.
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Picture: Cape {town} Etc gallery