Watch – Cape Town Planning Tribunal agreed with officials almost every time

Over thirteen months, Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal ruled on 1,328 land-use and development cases. Not one was recorded as an explicit departure from city planners’ recommendations. The pattern surfaced in a fight over two data centres proposed near Cape Town International Airport, where objectors warned of a 174-megawatt draw on the grid and 4.4 billion litres of water a year, in communities that already struggle to pay municipal bills. Daily Maverick’s Kevin Bloom’s reporting explains what the numbers show, how the city defends them, why the city says the tribunal occasionally disagrees, and why the tribunal’s required independence - set out in national law - is now in question.

Reporting by: Kevin Bloom
Filmed by: Joel Seboa
Edited by: Anda Tolibadi
Produced by: Emilie Gambade
Creative input by: Malibongwe Tyilo
Sub-edited by: Ian Wolstenholme 

For Daily Maverick’s full report on this issue, please see the link here and here.

The meeting minutes of Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal contain one line that recurs so often it becomes background noise: “The MPT approved the application for the reasons set out in the planner’s report.”

It appears after almost every case.

Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal, the MPT, is the body that decides how land in the city gets used: rezonings, subdivisions, developments large and small. It is meant to be an independent check on the city’s own planners. I looked at every ruling the tribunal made over thirteen months, from July 2025 to July 2026, 1,328 cases in total. Not one was recorded, in the minutes, as an explicit departure from the recommendation of city officials.

That’s not the same as saying the tribunal never disagreed. It's the most that the written record can support.

One case shows what “zero recorded” can mean in practice. 

Cape Town Data Centres 

In July 2026, the tribunal’s northeastern panel considered an application to rezone land next to Cape Town's airport for two giant data centres. You can watch my colleague Lindsey Schutters’ video on this.

On paper, it was a routine subdivision and consolidation request. In practice, according to an objection filed by the Legal Resources Centre, the centres would draw down 174 megawatts of electricity from the public grid, and consume roughly 4.4 billion litres of water a year under conventional cooling methods. 

The objection was brought on behalf of the Housing Assembly, representing residents of informal settlements and low-income housing across the Western Cape, with support from the UK-based non-profit Foxglove. Their attorney, Kimal Harvey, told the tribunal that the developer's own submission never mentioned these figures - that the scale of the strain on water and power had been left for objectors to calculate themselves.

“It should not be lost on the Tribunal,” the objection stated, “that these are predominantly vulnerable and low-income communities who can barely afford to pay the municipal rates for electricity and water as it stands. This additional stress on the grid will in no way, shape or form benefit them in these circumstances.”

The tribunal approved the application anyway, by four votes to one. It deferred the question of water and electricity impact to a site development plan the developer had not yet produced. The dissenting vote came from panel member Wally Johnstone, who put it plainly afterward: “I’m obliged to conclude most of us don’t know what is required in terms of water and electricity demand in an application we're asked to approve.”

That single case turned out to be representative of something much larger. 

My analysis of all 1,328 rulings - across the tribunal's four district panels, drawn from fifty sets of meeting minutes - found that MPT decisions matched the city's own recommendation in almost 90 percent of cases overall: 1,192 out of 1,328. Administrative penalties matched at a rate of 96 percent. Land-use applications, the more contested, judgment-based cases like the data centre rezoning, still matched 73 percent of the time. Across the entire dataset, not a single ruling was recorded as an explicit departure from the planner's report. The remaining cases were deferred, withdrawn, or too ambiguous in the written record to classify either way — which means it's impossible to say, from the minutes alone, how often the tribunal genuinely tested the city's recommendations rather than simply endorsing them.

The law governing the tribunal is specific about why that independence matters. The Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act, known as Spluma, requires tribunals to weigh spatial justice and environmental impact, bars serving municipal councillors from sitting on them, and sets strict term limits for members, precisely to keep the body insulated from political and commercial pressure. 

I shared my findings with the City of Cape Town. The response came from Deputy Mayor Eddie Andrews, who oversees spatial planning. He pointed to the roughly 60 professional planners the city employs, whose recommendations, he said, “are based in law and policy” and argued that because tribunal members and city officials apply “the very same legal and policy criteria,” a high rate of agreement was to be expected. “If it were not the case,” he wrote, “there would be great cause for concern.”

Andrews went further: “To insinuate the MPT system is dysfunctional or captured because of this correlation demonstrates a sheer misunderstanding of the decision-making processes and applicable criteria.”

But that reasoning has a problem. Andrews was, in effect, arguing that the law requires the tribunal to agree with planners, which is the very question in dispute. Independent decision-makers, applying the same criteria, can still reach different conclusions, particularly in cases that turn on judgment. A high correlation rate doesn't prove the system is working as intended. It could also be also consistent with a tribunal that has stopped exercising independent judgment altogether. 

And in the same response, Andrews undercut his own argument. Without pointing to a single case or any evidence, he added: “there are occasional instances where, after deliberation, the MPT comes to a different conclusion for specific reasons.” That’s the city itself saying disagreement does happen — while its own written record doesn't show a single instance of it happening. If occasional disagreement is normal, as Andrews says, its near-total absence from thirteen months of minutes is exactly what the city was just telling me shouldn't cause concern. 

A second case, heard by the tribunal's southeastern panel in March, illustrates how far that gap can go.

Thersia du Toit-Smit, a state advocate with South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority, objected in her private capacity as the mother of a child with autism spectrum disorder, backed by 221 of her neighbours in Durbanville. The application was from Engen Holdings, for a service station 18.81 metres from her home and just over 50 metres from a primary school. Du Toit-Smit argued that the tribunal, as a body bound by the Constitution, could not approve the application without weighing her child’s, and the schoolchildren's, constitutional right to an environment that does not harm their health, and the constitutional principle that a child's best interests are paramount.

In the recording of that hearing, the tribunal's chair, David Daniels, turned to the city’s own technical adviser and asked whether the objector’s “very legal” arguments - her references to the Constitution - were even relevant. The adviser, Jaco van der Westhuizen, said he wasn't qualified to address legal questions, that the tribunal wasn’t a court of law, and pointed the panel instead to a clause in the municipal by-law. 

The application was approved, again for the reasons set out in the planner's report. The ruling did not engage with Du Toit-Smit's constitutional argument at all, and so she is now appealing.

That pattern connects to an earlier finding in my reporting. 

Asked directly whether the tribunal’s independence was still intact, Andrews maintained that it was. “The MPT functions independently, and to imply a different interpretation is disingenuous,” he said. The city has also framed its approvals as necessary. Cape Town's households are growing at 2.3 percent a year, Andrews said, and its Integrated Development Plan calls for greater density to accommodate that growth.

My questions were never about whether density, or growth, or new investment serve the city. They were about whether the body legally required to weigh those decisions independently, under national law, not just city policy, is still doing so. Spluma doesn’t just set out a process - it requires tribunals to weigh development principles like spatial equity, environmental integrity and long-term sustainability, principles that echo the values in South Africa's Constitution. Whether that standard is still being met, or the tribunal has simply stopped saying no, is the question the numbers leave open. DM