The Constitutional Court has ruled on the DA's system of corruption - IOL

The court ordered the province and the city to submit reports under oath to the Western Cape High Court within three months, by October, detailing their affordable housing plans and reporting on the number of affordable houses actually delivered in the inner city and surrounds since the Tafelberg litigation began in 2017.

THERE is a particular kind of silence that settles over this country when the truth arrives, and it is a silence that the people who need that truth the most can never quite afford.

On the second of July 2026, the Constitutional Court delivered a unanimous judgment that was nothing short of a damning indictment of the Democratic Alliance’s governance in the Western Cape, and it was the kind of ruling that should have dominated every front page and every evening news bulletin for weeks.

The court found that the DA-led provincial government and the City of Cape Town had failed in their constitutional duty to provide affordable housing in well-located areas, that their approach to social and affordable housing “perpetuated spatial inequality” and “fell short of Constitutional standard,” and that their policy of building only on the city’s outskirts was creating “poverty traps on the city’s outskirts, far from economic opportunities and social amenities”.

Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla, writing for a unanimous court, made it clear that the location of housing is not a mere detail but a constitutional imperative, and that “the matter is about the full participation in the life of the city, including access to front-facing centres such as the CBD and Sea Point”.

The court ordered the province and the city to submit reports under oath to the Western Cape High Court within three months, by October, detailing their affordable housing plans and reporting on the number of affordable houses actually delivered in the inner city and surrounds since the Tafelberg litigation began in 2017.

The answer to that second question, as anyone who has followed this case knows, is zero.

This is not an administrative failure.

This is a deliberate choice, made over and over again, to protect the property values and the exclusivity of wealthy areas at the direct expense of the poor.

When the court asked the province to account for its delivery, the province declined even to attend a parliamentary briefing on the implications of the judgment, sending a letter claiming it was “in the process of sourcing legal advice” and would prefer to brief the committee once the supervisory order had been discharged.

ANC MP Sello Dithebe called the excuse “flimsy and disrespectful,” and COSATU in the Western Cape demanded that “heads must roll,” insisting that officials who pushed the unlawful sale “must face consequences”.

But here is the thing that should trouble us most, and it is the part of this story that nobody in power wants to talk about. The ruling was monumental; it was historic, and the mainstream media in this country let it slip away into the ether almost without a trace.

As one commentator observed, the court’s ruling and the scathing finding on Cape Town’s dismal failure to provide basic services have confirmed what poor residents have known for years, and yet the judgment was met with a “deafening silence”.

When the highest court in the land issues a structural interdict forcing a major metro to account for its spatial failures, it should be front-page news; it should dominate talk radio; it should be the subject of urgent debate in Parliament and in every community hall from Khayelitsha to Mitchells Plain.

The reason this silence matters is that the DA’s corruption is not the kind that gets you arrested or hauled before the Zondo Commission. It is not the theft of public money in brown envelopes or the looting of state-owned enterprises. The DA’s corruption is far more insidious because it is ideological and systemic, and it is woven into the very fabric of how they govern.

When a party controls the state apparatus and uses it to maintain the spatial architecture of apartheid, when it sells off well-located public land to the highest bidder while poor people are forced to spend half their salaries commuting from the outskirts of the city, that is corruption. It is the theft of opportunity, the theft of dignity, the theft of the future.

The Tafelberg judgment exposed this ideological corruption in the clearest possible terms. The court found that the province had failed to conduct a meaningful public participation process, describing it as a “hollow box-ticking exercise” that failed to genuinely consider the views of affected communities.

It found that the province had unlawfully declared the property surplus to its needs and that the regulations allowing public participation only after a sale contract had been concluded were unconstitutional. It rejected the argument that the province’s hands were tied by a lack of national government funding, ordering it to find the resources to discharge its constitutional obligations. And it de-commodified public land, placing the onus on the state to prove that proposed property sales are reasonable in the context of its constitutional duty to spatial transformation.

Every one of these findings points to a party that has abandoned the constitutional project of transformation in favour of a governing philosophy that protects the interests of its wealthy, predominantly white support base while keeping its Indian and coloured voters angry enough to assume the behaviour of subliminal racists at best and overt racists at worst. That this game includes the division inherent in breaking a society is as corrupt and dangerous as tender corruption.

Brett Herron of the GOOD party put it plainly when he said that the court had “dismantled a central pillar of the DA’s policy to maintain spatial injustice in Cape Town,” and that rather than progressively dismantling the apartheid plan, the city and province “sought to normalise it, speaking the language of "better services for the Cape Flats" while studiously avoiding talk of integration”.

This is why the DA will never grow in poor areas, and why it will never rule South Africa as long as it clings to this ideological corruption. You cannot speak the language of constitutionalism while simultaneously fighting the Constitution in court when it demands that you provide housing for the poor. And you cannot rely on a media that is too comfortable, too distracted, or too invested in the DA’s respectable image to tell the truth about what you are doing.

The media failed the people of South Africa when it allowed this ruling to be buried. The judgment was not just about a piece of land in Sea Point. It was about the soul of a city and a country, and about whether we are serious about undoing the spatial apartheid that still defines the lives of millions. The DA is a modern, well-oiled political machine. However, its rot is masked by its efficiency. One could argue that, in complicity with the media, it is deadly efficient in protecting privilege at the expense of transformation equality.

Roshan Jainath is a community activist and writer.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or post.co.za