By Johnathan Paoli
City of Cape Town to invest R120 billion in infrastructure over the next ten years.
Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said the city will invest R120 billion in the next ten years to improve infrastructure across the metro, when tabling the metro’s infrastructure report on Thursday during a council meeting adding that 73% of the R11 billion infrastructure budget for the 2024 financial year is expected to be spent on lower-income communities as well as informal settlements.
Hill-Lewis said the multi-billion rand upgrades to the wastewater works were on track in order to reduce sewage spills, especially in poor communities.
“By quadrupling our sewer plant replacement targets to 100km annually. Increasing pump station-related projects with an increase of 330% over this budget cycle for pump station expenditure and upgrades.
“Also, the bulk sewer upgrades that are taking place around the city in Milnerton, Gordon’s Bay, Philippi, and the largest current sewer upgrade project in South Africa, the Cape Flats sewer upgrade.”
In addition, the City of Cape Town has unveiled its plan to deal with the 32 million litres of raw sewage that is now being discharged into the Atlantic Ocean every day, following a public uproar over the massive sewage plumes floating off the coast, notably at Camps Bay, where more than two million litres of ‘sieved raw sewage’ was allegedly dumped into the sea.
Hill-Lewis noted that the investments were necessary as Cape Town was about to surpass Johannesburg as South Africa’s most populous city, with the census confirming that Cape Town would soon be a city of five-million people.
He noted that the city’s infrastructure investments would create an estimated 135 000 jobs over the three-year period, excluding downstream economic benefits.
“This year we are glad to report yet another significant increase in planned investment in water and sanitation infrastructure, largely driven by our programmes to reduce sewer spills,” said Hill-Lewis.
The mayor said that this included quadrupling the sewer pipe replacement to 100 km annually as well as ongoing major bulk sewer upgrades in several parts of the city, including the Cape Flats line.
Hill-Lewis said that new projects to improve public transport, worth R21-billion, are planned along three corridors in the outer years of the next decade – Khayelitsha–Century City, Symphony Way, and Klipfontein.
“These corridors are the next major long-term investments after the completion of MyCiTi Phase 2A route servicing the metro southeast from Claremont/Wynberg to Khayelitsha/Mitchells Plain, currently the biggest infrastructure project in the Western Cape worth R5.4-billion over the next three years,” the mayor said.
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