City of Cape Town

History

Cape Town first received local self-government in 1839, with the promulgation of a municipal ordinance by the government of the Cape Colony. When it was created, the Cape Town municipality governed only the central part of the city known as the City Bowl, and as the city expanded, new suburbs became new municipalities, until by 1902 there were 10 separate municipalities in the Cape Peninsula. During the 20th century, many of the suburban municipalities became unsustainable and merged into the Cape Town municipality or combined with other suburbs; but at the end of apartheid in 1994 the metropolitan area was still divided up into several separate municipalities.

As part of the post-1994 reforms, municipal government experienced a complete overhaul. In 1996 the Cape Town metropolitan area was divided into six municipalities – Cape Town/Central, Tygerberg, South Peninsula, Blaauwberg, Oostenberg and Helderberg – along with a Metropolitan Administration to oversee the whole metropolitan area. At the time of the 2000 municipal elections these various structures were merged to form the City of Cape Town as a single metropolitan municipality governing the whole metropolitan area. It is for this reason that the City of Cape Town is sometimes referred to as the "Unicity".

The current municipality covers Cape Point in the south-west, Somerset West in the south-east, and Atlantis in the north, and includes Robben Island.

Politics

Cape Town is governed by a 231-member city council, which chooses the executive mayor, who in turn chooses an 11-member Mayoral Committee. The city is divided into 116 wards; each ward directly elects one member of the council. The other 115 councillors are elected by a system of party-list proportional representation. The city manager is the non-political head of the city's administration.

After the creation of the "unicity" from the six previous municipalities, the city was divided into 16 subcouncils, later increased to the present 24. Subcouncils consist of geographically clustered wards with proportional councillors assigned to them and led by a subcouncil chairman who is elected by a majority vote of each subcouncil.

Executive incumbents

With the Democratic Alliance (DA) having won an absolute majority of council seats in the election of 3 August 2016, its mayoral candidate Patricia de Lille, who has served as mayor since 2011, was re-elected. The current executive Deputy Mayor is Ian Neilson.

The current city manager is Achmat Ebrahim, who was appointed in April 2006.

The local municipality was one of the four to have passed the 2009-10 audit by the Auditor-General of South Africa, who deemed it to have a clean administration.

Election results

The following table shows the results of the 2016 election.

Electoral history

The City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality in its present form took shape after the 2000 municipal elections. The old Central Cape Town MLC council had been governed by the New National Party (NNP), but they were losing support to the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Party (DP). To strengthened the opposition vote against the ANC, the DP and NNP agreed to contest the election together. To this end DP changed its name to Democratic Alliance (DA), and NNP members ran as DA candidates in the local election. The DA won Cape Town with an outright majority, and Peter Marais of the NNP became mayor of the unicity.

DA leader Tony Leon's attempt to remove Marais from his position in 2001 caused the disintegration of the alliance, and NNP came to join forces with the ANC. Marais was replaced as mayor by Gerald Morkel, but Morkel was himself soon ousted in October 2002 after a large number of DA councilors had defected to the NNP after the local floor crossing period. Nomaindia Mfeketo of the ANC became mayor supported by an ANC-NNP coalition. In 2004, after a dismal showing in the general elections that year, the NNP prepared for dissolution and merger with the ANC, and most of its councilors joined the governing party. This gave the ANC an outright majority on the council.

This lasted until the 2006 local government election, in which the DA was the largest single party, ahead of the ANC, but with no party holding a majority. The new Independent Democrats (ID) led by Patricia de Lille was in third place. The African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) initiated negotiations with five other smaller parties elected to council who together formed a block of fifteen councillors acting as king makers, who collectively became known as the Multi-Party Forum parties. Despite the ID voting with the ANC, Helen Zille of the DA was elected executive mayor on 15 March 2006 by a very narrow margin of one vote when the Multi-Party Forum voted with the DA. The DA-led coalition was also known as the Multi-Party Government. Andrew Arnolds of the ACDP was elected executive deputy mayor and Jacob "Dirk" Smit of the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) was elected the speaker.

In January 2007 the DA-led coalition introduced the ID following the expulsion of the small Africa Muslim Party from the coalition when it supported a failed bid to oust Zille and the DA and form a coalition with the ANC. As a result of the ID's support, the DA-led coalition significantly increased its majority which resulted in a much more stable city government. The ID's Charlotte Williams became executive deputy mayor. However, she resigned just a few months later, and the post then went to Grant Haskin of the ACDP in late 2007. The DA would also bolster its position through by-election victories and floor crossing defections. After securing the backing of the ID the DA did not really need any other party to have a majority in council, and several of the smaller coalition partners were dropped from the city government at the time of the national general elections in 2009, including the ACDP and FF+. Ian Neilson of the DA became deputy mayor, while Dirk Smit, who had defected to the DA, retained the position of speaker. Both still hold their positions. Helen Zille left the mayorship the same year to take up the position of premier of the Western Cape, and Dan Plato became mayor.

In 2010, the DA and ID formalized an agreement in which the ID would merge into the DA by 2014. This was prompted in part by the ID's disappointing result in the 2009 general election. As per the agreement, ID ceased to exist at the local level after the 2011 municipal elections with ID members running as DA candidates. DA won a large outright majority in the election, and ID leader Patricia de Lille, who had defeated Plato in an earlier internal election, became the new mayor. The party extended its lead even further to win a two thirds majority of the seats on the City of Cape Town council in the 2016 municipal elections, and De Lille will thus serve a second term.

Tourism Department

Tourism is an important industry for South Africa and Cape Town is one of the country’s leading tourist destinations, consistently ranked among the world’s top places to visit by independent sources.

The Tourism Department of the City of Cape Town municipality has the mandate to develop the city’s tourism offering in accordance with the South African Constitution (Act 108 of 1996). This act makes each municipality responsible for the management, leadership and planning of development within its boundaries. This includes the advancement and marketing of tourism.

Specific actions and goals for the development of tourism have been set up by the Tourism Development Framework and Spatial Investment Framework for Cape Town, and approved by the City in 2004.

These are the guidelines within which the Tourism Department of the City of Cape Town acts, in partnership with Cape Town Tourism, Cape Town Routes Unlimited, and the private sector.

The Tourism Department of the City of Cape Town has two branches, namely, Local Area Tourism Development and Destination Development.

Local Area Tourism Development is responsible for the following -

Destination Development is responsible for the following -

The primary aim of the Department is to develop tourism while protecting and conserving resources via responsible tourism practices in order to promote a sustainable future and long-lasting livelihoods in the tourism industry.

Geography

The municipality has a total area of 2455 km².

Main places

The 2001 census divided the municipality into the following main places:

Adjacent municipalities

The City of Cape Town is also bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the south and west.