A Modest Proposal for Cape Town's Fall from Grace

Dear Your Worship Geordin Hill-Lewis, Mayor of Cape Town,

I write to you with a heavy heart and an even heavier sense of national imbalance. News has reached us here in Canada that once again—again—Cape Town has achieved a clean audit. It’s getting awkward now.

According to South Africa’s Auditor General, of the eight metropolitan municipalities in our beloved country, only Cape Town managed to pass the audit with flying colours. Meanwhile, the rest—Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, Tshwane, and others—collectively fumbled R33.29 billion (US$1.8 billion) through irregular expenditures since just 2021/22. It's an impressive display of synchronized mismanagement, and quite frankly, your clean governance is ruining the aesthetic.

Your Worship, Johannesburg Ekurhuleni, Tshwane, and other South African cities led by some of my dearest black compatriots. Cape Town is the only city led by a white man and a white-dominated party. As a proud black man myself, I must ask—how can they compete when you insist on professional budgeting, service delivery, and accountability? The Auditor General even had the nerve to point out that Johannesburg, “the largest city on the continent,” has no shortage of skilled people. I mean, how rude. Expectations are such a burden.

So I come to you with a humble request: please, for the sake of national unity, consider misplacing just a modest R500 million next year. Nothing major—perhaps through a mysterious tender for fog removal or underwater streetlights. It would help level the playing field and reassure the public that all metros, regardless of who's in charge, are equally capable of catastrophic failure.

Let Cape Town stumble, if only to show that mismanagement is not a racial issue—it's a national tradition.

With patriotic mischief, 

David Himbara