Response by mayor de Lille to article in Mail and Guardian

"Dirt" on DA doesn't stick

After nearly 10 years of Democratic Alliance government in Cape Town, the people of the city have grown accustomed to a few things. These include: clean audits, the highest level of services in the country, capital budgets spent, innovative policies and strategies, clean government, billing systems that are reliable, and basic services that work.

The Mail & Guardian has searched high and low to find something, anything that suggests an abuse of power (“City of Cape Town accused of muzzling dissenter” and “Editorial: Led astray by sins of incumbency”).

The M&G has come up with an evidence-free, “he said, she said” story about a building ­extension. If that’s all there is to complain about after a decade, we will consider our governance model a success.

It is worrying that this newspaper chose to publish an article based on nebulous assertions and to write an editorial about it. It ran on the front page [and as a lead in the Cape Town edition] when our universities face an existential crisis and discussions began about the purchase of a R4-billion presidential jet.

– Zara Nicholson, spokesperson for Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille