Mayor Patricia de Lille’s vision for the City of Cape Town is to achieve the objectives broadly set out in the five pillars she used as her election campaign platform to become mayor: building an opportunity city, a safe city, an inclusive city, a caring city and an efficient city.

De Lille was speaking at a Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust dialogue event at the University of Cape Town on Tuesday, along with Cape Town city councillor and Congress of South African Trade Unions regional secretary for the Western Cape, Tony Ehrenreich.

“We are now working to giving those five pillars meaning in our government where they are used as the framework to focus this administration’s thinking and to create strategic priority areas for delivery. The implementation is complex, but they are all parts of a key message of delivery.”

De Lille said that while many others say that creating jobs was not the task of local government, she believed that there were opportunities for job creation to be carried out by the City of Cape Town. She specifically mentioned the opportunities that the council has provided by bringing back apprenticeship programmes in areas such as water and electricity, to assist plumbers and electricians in becoming formally qualified.

“We want to ensure that in Cape Town we create the economic environment in which investment grows and jobs can be created. In doing so, we aim to tackle unemployment and roll back the frontiers of poverty,” said De Lille.

She said that the council was drafting an Integrated Development Plan (IDP) for Cape Town, which would give life to the five key pillars. The plan would be used for the next five years to guide the budget allocations of the city. During the IDP public participation phase, the council intended to reach 1.5-million Cape Town residents for their input.

As the respondent in the dialogue, Ehrenreich, said that the challenge for Cape Town currently was to bring the various communities together, as he believed that the city was still divided economically, spatially and in racial terms. While Cape Town was leading the way in many respects, when compared with other South African cities, Ehrenreich felt that more could be done.

“Do we compare ourselves with the standards that may be so low, or do we compare our efforts with what it is that our people deserve? Surely that should be the measure? Whether you do less badly than someone else really doesn’t matter,” he said.

Ehrenreich spoke of building low-cost housing in the more wealthy suburbs of Cape Town as a means to cross some of the divides in the community, using Constantia as an example. This discussion has been under way in Cape Town for a number of years and Ehrenreich said that if the community of Constantia welcomed this move, there should not be an impact on property prices.

“Even if our house properties were to come down by R100 000 or R200 000 on a R3-million house would that be such a bad thing if it undoes the legacy of apartheid? Those are the choices we have to make in this city.”

Reacting to Ehrenreich’s comments on integrating communities, De Lille said that it was her intention to build an inclusive city but that there are many challenges to achieving this.

“We are struggling right now. The South African National Defence Force is sitting on acres of land on the N1 at Wingfield and acres in Landsdowne Road. We tried to buy that land from the National Defence Force so that we can build integrated communities and bring people closer to their workplace. What happened? The Defence Force and the Minister refused.”