Helen Zille, Cape Town's new mayor, thinks the Democratic Alliance (DA) will deliver bigger and better than any previous administration.
The trouble is it won't because the odds are stacked high against it.
Cape Town's electricity and sewerage infrastructure is crumbling and in urgent need of huge investment; the administration is weak, demoralised and distrustful of Zille; the housing crisis grows every year no matter if the province spends its entire budget; and the city faces a R3bn price tag to meet Fifa requirements for the soccer World Cup in 2010.
Added to this is the problem that the DA might not rule Cape Town for very long: the coalition that brought it the mayorship by three votes is fragile, composed of six small parties held together only through the promise of positions and bigger pay packets.
A motion of no-confidence could be brought against Zille at any time and, come September next year, the ANC will be doing its utmost to unseat her during the floor-crossing window.
This means Zille will have to spend an inordinate amount of time simply holding the alliance together - consulting, cajoling and flattering - when it is clear decisions and prompt action is what the city needs to get it moving.
Zille is not unaware of the nightmare that awaits her.
She says the DA will be different: "We will try to be more efficient. We will be more transparent and open," she says.
As with all city politicians that have gone before her, housing is the problem that is most on her mind. Cape Town, says Zille, gets about R350m/year for housing - which would allow almost 9 000 matchbox houses to be built annually, assuming that infrastructure for water and sewerage has been paid for out of the city's other budgets.
"There are 250 000 households on the waiting list, which grows by 16 000/year. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out that you are going backwards every year," she says.
It's a numbers game that the city just can't win, and rather than continuing to promise everyone a house it would be far better to take an honest look at housing policy: either changing the national budget to ensure that there will be brick houses for all, or changing the policy to fit the budget by giving everyone services, like water and sewerage, but not all of them houses, she argues.
It might be a more realistic way of looking at the problem. But Zille is completely without influence to change national housing policy. And were she to try to do it alone, announcing to the poor of Cape Town that the DA did not plan to build houses, would be political suicide for her party.
So the demand for housing is something she will be stuck with. So is the controversy over who will get houses .
Cape Town, believe it or not, still has no credible housing waiting list. The city has never succeeded in merging the hodge-podge of lists from the 39 municipalities that once served Cape Town and its outlying areas. After protests last year over housing, the city began to draw up the list afresh - but it is not clear who will get to be on top or on what basis they will be placed there.
It is partly because each successive administration has tried to prioritise what it perceived to be the visible political deliverables - mainly housing - that Cape Town's infrastructure is in such a state of terrible neglect.
Six years ago, the Unicity Commission - a body set up to strategise the merging of Cape Town's six metropolitan substructures - put the sewerage infrastructure backlog at R1,4bn. Neighbourhood-based sewage pump stations built decades ago are no longer able to deal with the demands of a city of 3m people. But since the commission's warning, no investment in sewerage infrastructure has been made, except for an emergency R200m at one of the sewerage works.
The electricity crisis is more visible. Cape Town needs additional generating capacity urgently and the city will have to campaign hard with national authorities to make sure that it gets it sooner rather than later.
Aside from the crisis in the supply, the distribution network - 6 000 substations that fall under the control of the city and now regional electricity distributor RED1 - are decrepit. With a maximum lifespan of 30 years, most are 33 years old and, says an official, "have been in crisis maintenance mode for five years". It is these substations that continually trip the network when Koeberg attempts to bring the power back up after an outage.
RED1 has submitted a refurbishment budget of R200m. However, the budget process in council, which is well under way and must be complete by the end of March, has reportedly already refused and plans to allocate only R150m for electricity distribution maintenance.
Zille and the DA will find themselves with little choice but to start to make up for 30 years of under investment to avoid a serious collapse. This is not good news for a party that hopes to distinguish itself from its opponents by being bigger and better on delivery.
Acknowledges Zille: "All the things that have to be priorities are the things that people take for granted. We could spend R2bn refurbishing the sewerage system and if people can still flush their toilets they won't notice that we have delivered anything."
The electricity crisis will also result in lost revenues for the city. As in most municipalities, electricity distribution is the city's cash cow, contributing R400m to the budget each year. But business and consumers are under orders to save electricity to avoid major outages in winter. The best-case scenario - assuming that Koeberg's first unit comes back on line at the end of May - will be a need for a 9% saving, and hence a 9% loss in city revenues.
Added to the heavy demands on the capital budget is the 2010 soccer World Cup. On the insistence of Fifa, a 15-storey, R1,2bn stadium must be built in two years and enormous investments made in transport links and infrastructure in the central city. Though business is excited about the investment, huge risks loom, not least of which will be maintaining an enormous football stadium for years in a city that doesn't play much soccer.
So how will Zille do it? Her biggest obstacle, she predicts, will be the capacity of the administration.
The administration is in a mess. It has not been properly reformed since the amalgamation of the six metropolitan substructures and before that the 39 different municipalities that once made up Cape Town. There has been no attempt to come up with a plan of how to deliver services across the metropolitan area and the city hasn't done certain basic things, like conducting a land audit to find out what land could be available for housing.
Former Unicity Commission chairman and strategy consultant Nico McLachlan says Zille will need to establish a credible relationship with the administration. During its previous stint of governing Cape Town - 2000 to 2002 - the DA went in boots and all and fired the city's top management, declaring them to be party political appointments.
This time the DA will not be that crude, says Zille. After an initial pronouncement that city manager Wallace Mgoqi would have to go because he openly campaigned for the ANC during the election, she is being more cautious.
"If anybody is fired it will be for performance issues alone," she says, adding, " this is not the time for rash pronouncements."
But Mgoqi will be replaced. He is described by insiders as "totally out of his depth", lacking the sophisticated skills of a city manager and has presided over an administration which has experienced one corruption scandal after another. Previously head of the National Land Commission, who ran a small office and adjudicated land claims, Mgoqi has not been up to the job of running a city with a budget of R18bn.
Mgoqi's top management team is also not fully behind him. He has two close allies - Mthuthuzeli Swarts and Bulumka Msengana - with whom he shares a past in the Pan Africanist Congress in the Eastern Cape. Both Swarts and Msengana have at different stages chaired the council's procurement committee, from which a number of problematic tenders have emanated - an area where Zille has sworn a commitment to transparent government.
But Mgoqi is literally at loggerheads with others in the team, two of whom have filed complaints against him, using council procedure.
Infrastructure backlogs and a weak and suspicious administration are two of Zille's three big problems, say McLachlan. The third is that Cape Town, despite being called a world-class city by the previous ANC administration, does not have either a long-term vision or an economic growth plan. There is no sense of how it, as a city, interacts with the global economy or with the region in which it is located.
A great deal rests on the DA's assumption that it will deliver because it will be more efficient. It is by being better than the ANC that it hopes it will convince African people in Cape Town that, despite being a white party, it is not anti black and it cares about them.
But legitimacy will be one of Zille's most difficult deliverables.
Though she herself has made the effort to learn Xhosa and has worked tirelessly in her Crossroads constituency to solve individuals' problems, the word on the township streets is that Cape Town has gone back to apartheid.
In the election, only 3% of people in Cape Town's black townships voted for the DA. And already the ANC has labelled Zille's statements as racist.
Says ANC provincial chairman James Ngculu: "Helen Zille has never been acceptable to us. The racism she was sprouting during the election campaign was appalling. And in her acceptance speech she made it clear that she will not ignore the problems in Seapoint just because there are problems in Gugulethu."
What Zille had said was that the economy in Gugulethu cannot be grown by leaving the seawall in Seapoint to crumble. Ngculu's interpretation, wilful or not, is a twisting of her words. That is something she will have to expect.
But with infrastructure demands, a 15-storey stadium, an unrealistic housing policy and a weak administration weighing her down, how Zille will manage to better and discredit the ANC is hard to imagine. With this in mind there is a danger that she is not taking the legitimacy crisis seriously enough. She believes the DA won Cape Town fair and square and everybody should get on and accept it.
"One thing I am quite clear about is that 60% of the people voted against the ANC," she says. True. But she would do well to remember that 40% voted against the DA and almost all of them were black.
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