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A City That Works — But For Whom?
Cape Town runs better than almost any other city in South Africa. That is not the debate. The real question heading into the November 2026 local government elections is far more uncomfortable: does it work for everyone?
Build One South Africa (BOSA) is betting that the answer is no — and that a growing number of Cape Town residents feel it too. On Saturday, party leader Mmusi Maimane unveiled Roger Solomons, the party’s national spokesperson, as its mayoral candidate for the City of Cape Town. The announcement, made at the Iziko South African Museum, was more than a campaign launch. It was a direct challenge to the Democratic Alliance’s long-standing grip on South Africa’s most administratively celebrated metro, and a signal that the 2026 race will be fought not on service delivery records alone, but on the question of economic inclusion.
The thesis Solomons put forward is straightforward, even if its implications are radical: affordability must become the organising principle of city governance. Every municipal decision, he argued, should be judged by whether it improves the ability of ordinary residents to live, work and remain in the city. If it does not, it cannot stand. That is a fundamentally different yardstick from the clean audits and stable governance the DA has long used to define success — and it reframes the entire mayoral contest around a question the ruling party would rather not answer directly.
The Affordability Argument and Why It Lands
Cape Town is, by most measures, one of the world’s most unequal cities. Housing costs have surged, public transport remains fragmented and unreliable, and working-class communities — many of them on the Cape Flats — are geographically and economically cut off from the opportunities concentrated in the city bowl and the Atlantic Seaboard. Solomons, the son of a pastor and the first in his family to attend university, framed his candidacy explicitly around this structural reality. “Systems determine opportunity,” he said, drawing on his experience across local and national government to argue that leadership must focus on expanding access, not merely maintaining the status quo.
His policy commitments follow that logic with some specificity. On housing, Solomons pledged to double the current delivery rate to at least 10,000 affordable housing opportunities per year, conduct a full audit of all municipal land within 90 days of taking office, and establish a City Land Housing Programme that redirects public land toward public need. On the economy, he committed to removing municipal business licence fees for qualifying small businesses in their first year of operation — a direct stimulus for the township entrepreneurs and informal traders who generate livelihoods outside the formal economy. He also promised greater investment in digital inclusion and in affordable public transport links connecting peripheral communities to economic hubs. These are not vague aspirations; they are measurable commitments that will define how seriously voters take the BOSA offer.
What makes the affordability argument politically potent is that it does not require voters to reject Cape Town’s administrative strengths — it simply insists that those strengths are necessary but not sufficient. “Cape Town does not need to abandon what has worked,” Solomons said, “but it must now move beyond it.” That framing is shrewd. It neutralises the DA’s strongest rebuttal — that opposition parties would wreck what works — while still making a compelling case for change.
The Coalition Calculus and the Road to November 2026
BOSA is not entering this race under any illusion of outright victory. The DA retained Cape Town in the 2021 municipal elections with 58.2% of the vote and 135 seats, giving it an absolute majority in the only metro it controls nationally. That dominance will not evaporate in a single electoral cycle. What BOSA — and the broader opposition field — is really competing for is influence: enough seats to force accountability, shift the political conversation, and potentially shape a coalition if the DA’s majority slips.
Maimane was candid about this. He argued that Cape Town should not remain under single-party dominance, and that coalition politics, when built around shared priorities rather than opportunism, can strengthen rather than destabilise governance. “There is strength in coalitions because coalitions bring different ideas,” he said. It is a pragmatic position, and one that reflects the new political geography of South African local government, where coalitions have become the norm in metros like Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni.
The opposition field is crowded. The DA has confirmed incumbent Geordin Hill-Lewis. ActionSA has named Dereleen James. The Good Party and Rise Mzansi have jointly backed Brett Herron. Each of these candidacies draws from a broadly similar well of discontent — inequality, housing, transport, the cost of living — which raises the risk that opposition votes fragment without translating into seats. For BOSA, the challenge will be to differentiate Solomons not just from the DA but from the other challengers making nearly identical arguments. His personal story, his policy specificity and BOSA’s openness to coalition-building may be the differentiators that matter most.
What is already clear is that November 2026 will not be a referendum on whether Cape Town is well-run. Everyone concedes that it is. It will be a referendum on whether “well-run” is enough — and whether a city that prides itself on being South Africa’s best-governed metro can also become its most equitable one. That is a question worth fighting an election over.
