Deputy President Paul Mashatile defended President Cyril Ramaphosa's remarks on learning from DA-led municipalities, claiming they were taken out of context during a parliamentary session. He highlighted disparities in service delivery in Western Cape townships despite clean audits. The exchange drew reactions from MPs across parties.
On October 30, 2025, during a parliamentary question and answer session on municipal governance, Deputy President Paul Mashatile addressed criticism of President Cyril Ramaphosa's September comments to ANC councillors. Ramaphosa had said, “There’s nothing wrong with competition … [the best run municipalities] are often DA-controlled municipalities. We need to ask ourselves what it is that they are doing that is better than what we are doing. There’s nothing wrong with us saying we want to go and see what Cape Town is doing, what is Stellenbosch doing, how they craft everything.”
Mashatile responded to Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema's question about whether Western Cape municipalities offered the best governance model. “The President was quoted out of context,” Mashatile said, emphasizing that Ramaphosa meant councillors should learn from one another, particularly on clean audits. He noted that in the 2023/2024 audit cycle, 41 municipalities received clean audits, many run by the DA or DA-led coalitions, with Cape Town as the only metro to achieve this. However, Mashatile clarified that Ramaphosa did not claim the Western Cape as a panacea for good governance.
Mashatile pointed to service delivery gaps in townships like Khayelitsha, inviting Malema to visit next week. “When you go to Khayelitsha and some of the townships and informal settlements in this province, I don’t see the good governance,” he said. He blamed media reporting for creating an impression that Ramaphosa praised the DA and stressed persistent disparities for black communities in the Western Cape. “The Western Cape’s municipal governance model is not the best in the country, as it fails to address the legacy of apartheid-era spatial segregation,” Mashatile declared, prompting uproar and laughter among MPs.
Democratic Alliance MP James Lorimer countered by highlighting Cape Town's provisions, including the largest free electricity and water for indigent households. He referenced Mashatile’s Camps Bay mansion, urging him to assess electricity and water in Khayelitsha properly. Mashatile retorted that services work in Camps Bay but not in townships like Gugulethu and Nyanga, scoring the DA six out of ten in affluent areas but zero in poorer ones. He reiterated that the Western Cape is not the optimal model, without specifying an alternative.