Cape Town, Western Cape — Brett Herron has been named the GOOD Party’s mayoral candidate for the City of Cape Town ahead of the 2026 Local Government Elections, setting out a six-pledge programme built around affordable housing, safer neighbourhoods and a single standard of service delivery across the city.
The announcement forms part of the GOOD Party’s selection of mayoral candidates across the Western Cape. Speaking in a studio interview, Herron described Cape Town as a city that needs “courageous, fearless leadership” with both experience and the capacity to deliver — and argued that voters now have reason to consider an alternative to the Democratic Alliance, which has long held the majority in the city.
A candidacy shaped by partnership
Asked whether he put himself forward or was selected by the party, Herron said it was a combination of both.
He confirmed that the GOOD Party is working in partnership with Rise Mzansi, and that his name will appear on the ballot representing the GOOD Party. His central argument to Capetonians is that the city should back a candidate and a party that can pair a plan with a proven record of implementing it.
That record, he said, is the reason he believes he can be trusted with the mayoral portfolio.
Seventeen years in public service
Herron pointed to 17 years in public service, much of it spent serving Cape Town, including roughly a decade in executive office within the City of Cape Town.
His portfolios included transport and urban development, covering spatial planning as well as formal and public housing. Among the initiatives he credited himself with delivering are the My City programme and a housing turnaround strategy which, he said, produced more houses in a single financial year than any other year in the city’s history.
He also cited plans to develop affordable housing in well-located areas and the restructuring of the city through its Spatial Development Framework — work, he argued, whose benefits are only now becoming visible.
Ending the “tale of two cities”
The heart of Herron’s pitch is the gap between Cape Town’s prosperous centres and its neglected townships, including areas such as Khayelitsha.
He described residents living in overcrowded and undignified conditions, amid squalor, failing infrastructure, a lack of public amenities, poor services and slow responses to service delivery requests — with sewage running through streets. Those conditions, he said, stand in stark contrast to the parts of the city that tourists and visitors experience.
His remedy is for Cape Town to become what he called a “city of one”: one standard of infrastructure, one standard for playgrounds, one standard for amenities and one standard for services.
Where that standard already exists, it should be maintained. Where communities have been left behind, capital investment should be directed to bring them up to a dignified level of living.
Apartheid’s infrastructure hierarchy
Herron argued that the disparity is not an accident of administration but the residue of history.
Cape Town, he said, is one of the most unequal cities in the world, with a hierarchy of infrastructure inherited from apartheid: white suburbs received state investment, spending declined as one moved into the Cape Flats, and investment in Black African townships was effectively nonexistent.
That hierarchy, he contended, persists today. He accused the incumbent mayor of dismissing the continuing spatial injustice of apartheid as propaganda rather than acknowledging it as reality.
For Herron, recognition is the prerequisite for reform. A government must first admit the problem exists before it can do the hard work of changing it.
He rejected the idea that the shortfall is primarily a funding problem. Cape Town has the resources, he said; what has been missing is the political will to redistribute them.
Six pledges linking housing, safety and inequality
Herron said the GOOD Party’s programme rests on six pledges, built on the premise that the city’s problems cannot be solved in isolation. Underinvestment in infrastructure, overcrowded housing andunsafe streets, he argued, are interconnected challenges rather than separate files.
Among the pledges he outlined:
- An affordable city. Herron said the affordability crisis is real for most Capetonians, with the exception of the super-rich.
- A housing city. Relieving overcrowded living conditions would ease the pressure those conditions place on infrastructure in the city’s most densely populated areas.
- A safer city. His approach is not simply to deploy more “boots on the ground” — soldiers, police and law enforcement officers — but to address the underlying conditions that generate crime.
- An equitable city. Capital investment must be prioritised in communities whose infrastructure falls below the standard enjoyed elsewhere in Cape Town.
- A trusted city. Residents should be heard when they raise problems, and public consultations should not become exercises in which the outcome has already been decided before the public is invited to participate.
Why he believes the DA can be beaten
Cape Town has long been a Democratic Alliance stronghold, but Herron said plainly that he believes the DA “deserves to lose” its majority.
His confidence rests on what he says he encounters in communities and conversations with voters: a growing fatigue with living conditions that can no longer be ignored, even by those who do not experience them firsthand.
He pointed to the N2 highway into the central business district, where arriving motorists are confronted with shacks and toilets perched precarily beside the road. Whether a person lives in the suburbs, resides in those settlements or is simply visiting the city, the scene is impossible to avoid.
That visibility, he said, has created an openness on the ground to hearing ideas from newer political parties.
Coalition terms: no blacklist, but clear non-negotiables
On post-election cooperation, Herron said the GOOD Party has not drawn up a list of parties it will or will not work with.
Instead, the party has set out non-negotiable priorities: tackling the municipal affordability crisis, addressing housing affordability and the broader housing crisis, improving safety, and reducing inequality.
He stressed the timing. Councillors and politicians begin work on the following year’s budget in November, meaning any prospective partners must be willing to confront those issues in that budget.
Parties that agree those priorities are potential partners — including the DA. Herron said the GOOD Party would be open to talks with the DA if it accepted that agenda.
The tariff court battle and a record of opposition
His criticism of the DA was sharp. He accused the party of governing with arrogance, complacency and a reliance on incumbency, and of refusing to entertain views from outside its own ranks.
He cited the council’s decision to introduce tariffs the previous year, which the GOOD Party challenged in court. Every opposition party in council warned that the tariffs were unlawful, he said, and an unprecedented 14,000 residents took part in the budget process to object. The DA ignored both, he alleged, forcing the GOOD Party to approach the courts to have the decision overturned.
That experience, he argued, illustrates a governing culture that needs to be corrected.
If the mayoral bid falls short
Herron remains a legislator, and said the party would decide what role he should play if he is not elected mayor.
He defended the GOOD Party’s five years in Cape Town council, where its caucus of nine councillors has, he said, performed “stellar” work challenging unlawful decisions and promoting motions to change how the city operates.
One example was a motion to scrap the fixed water levy introduced during the drought — a move the DA defeated using its majority.
The caucus has been at the forefront of the fight for a fairer Cape Town, he said. If he is required to join that caucus after the 2026 elections, he will do so.
