We have seen playing out on our TV screens and in the news media a growing conflict of interest in our public life. On the one side of this fight is a small and well-to-do elite who depend on high-paying government positions, tenders, and, contracts for their wealth. They are the political insiders.
Ald Cilliers Brink, the DA Tshwane Mayoral Candidate delivered the below address this morning
Watch the full address here
On the other side is the common good of ordinary South Africans, most of whom aren’t wealthy. Instead of seeking direct benefits from government, these folks would prefer the government to work and to deliver value for taxpayers’ money.
No government can serve both of these groups. It either satisfies the ever-growing appetites of the political insiders or delivers to the country. It cannot do both. Corruption is not just bad in and of itself; it leads to the breakdown of services, pushes up municipal bills, and drives away investment and jobs.
The ANC has come to represent the political insiders, a class of ANC cadres in government and in business which produce less and less for the benefit of the people and consume more and more at the public’s expense. If there is a zero-sum game in South African politics, it is between this cadre class and everyone else.
It is a fight between people who expect value for taxpayers’ money and cadres who demand to get paid regardless of performance. On the one side, you have ordinary people who want water in their taps, a stable supply of electricity, and for their waste to be collected on time.
On the other side, you have cadres who profit from water tankers, constant repairs to the same vandalised and neglected power lines and substations, and who will introduce new taxes to fund the inefficiencies of waste removal contractors.
The cadres are liquidating the state – using the money meant for the repair, maintenance, and replenishment of water and electricity infrastructure to fund so-called contracted services. They have for years been aided by incompetent but loyal ANC members deployed into government positions. But increasingly, a new generation can see what’s going on.
The fight between cadres and the common good of the South African people is also playing out in the City of Tshwane, the municipal government of the nation’s capital. A year ago, Herman Mashaba switched sides and placed the ANC back in power in Tshwane with the help of the EFF. In doing so, ActionSA became like many parties before it—a proxy of the ANC. Instead of pushing back against the predominance of the cadre class, ActionSA has collapsed into it.
At the time, I expressed concern about projects on which the DA and our coalition partners were making progress but which threatened the ANC cadre class and their consumption habits:
• The Hammanskraal clean water project aimed at giving people clean water in their taps and eliminating expensive and exploitative water tankers;
• The case against the Rooiwal Five, who delivered an irregular tender to the ANC benefactor Edwin Sodi for the upgrade of the plant that is polluting people’s water; and
• And the position of top officials, non-ANC cadres appointed under DA leadership, who would face pressure to fall in line with the ANC’s consumption programme.
In opposition, the DA has kept up pressure on all three of these fronts. The Hammanskraal water project has stalled, but we believe that it can still be delivered, that Edwin Sodi can still be blacklisted, and that his blessers in Tshwane can still be fired. But it is important to understand what we are pushing back against.
In the financial year that Dr. Nasiphi Moya took the helm as mayor, Tshwane spent more money on providing water tankers to communities that do have formal water reticulation than ever before in the City’s history.
In 2024, Tshwane spent R170 million on water tankers in formalised areas. With the takeover of the ANC/EFF/ActionSA coalition, water tanker spending went up to a staggering R500 million. Well, that’s what the City says. We have reason to believe that the spending is far more.
What happened between 2024 and 2025 wasn’t a drought or a water crisis worse than we’ve faced before. What happened is that Tshwane was taken over by an ANC/EFF/ActionSA coalition. While the start of the Hammanskraal clean water project should have reduced water tanker expenditure, the opposite happened.
Now that they are in power, the ANC, EFF, and ActionSA seem to have lost the spirited interest they had in Hammanskraal. If they were to visit Hammanskraal, residents will tell them that the same tanker operators who are paid more than ever before by the City to deliver water free of charge, in fact, sell the water. The systems and controls put in place by the DA-led coalition have been abandoned.
In 2024, Tshwane spent R307 million on security watchman services. In 2025, this budget was increased to R565 million. In our last year in office, the DA-led coalition commissioned a review of the City’s security model to deploy technology and armed response instead of the so-called watchman services that are not only expensive but ineffective.
On Mayor Moya’s desk is an investigative report that confirms that her ANC deputy mayor and MMC for finance, Eugene Modise, benefits from one of these watchman security contracts, which the City of Tshwane recently extended by irregular means. She says she is waiting for the speaker to table the report in council. The speaker says he is waiting for a legal opinion.
And while the ball is being passed from one member of the ANC/EFF/ActionSA coalition to another, Modise remains in place as finance MMC. This is the political leader who is meant to be fighting corruption in the tender system in Tshwane and driving the City’s financial recovery. Despite the money he continues to receive from Triotic Protection Services, he cannot even pay the municipal bill owed on property leased by one of his other companies.
Under Mayor Nasiphi Moya’s administration, water losses have increased to 39%, the highest they have ever been. Despite large-scale debt write-offs, the debtor’s book has increased. Instead of undertaking savings and reforms, a City cleansing levy has been introduced to plug the budget deficit. But spending on the actual function of City cleansing has not increased.
Money budgeted for a transactional adviser to put the city’s Rooiwal and Pretoria West power stations out to market was left unspent. By now, we could have had agreements to procure electricity independent from Eskom in the near future—a prospect which, if realised, would help the City push back against high electricity bills.
The plan to make the Wonderboom National Airport available to private operators through a concession or a developmental lease has been abandoned. So has the project to appoint a dedicated streetlight repair team and to roll out solar-powered streetlights.
To distract from the failure, Mayor Moya spends a lot of time on social media claiming to deliver, while in fact, the City’s service delivery capacity is being eroded. It doesn’t help to paint the roads and fix the streetlights for the G20 summit if those results cannot be maintained when political leaders go back to their home countries. Herman Mashaba and ActionSA will pay a lot of money to social media bots and influencers to polish the image of what is going on in Tshwane, to keep up the front which they are providing for the benefit of the cadre class represented by the ANC. But the front is coming off, and people can see what is happening.