Record of the WCID Board and WCID Operation Manager’s Deceit

Post 1 – 29 January 2026
Introduction to Posts

1. Since April 2025, Cheryl has been trying to get information from Arndt Mittendorf, the WCID Operations Manager (“WCID manager”), and the WCID Board (“the Board”), as well as to ensure that the WCID complies with all its legal obligations and compliance requirements under the CID by-law. In doing so, Cheryl has put to the test their stated objectives of “transparent governance” and claim that they “foster community engagement”.

2. It has unfortunately been an uphill battle. When Cheryl requested specific information, she was told she had to submit a formal application under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (“PAIA”). However, virtually every PAIA request, which often took her days to research and write, was met with deflection, obfuscation, incoherent responses, playing “dumb” or blanket refusals on the basis that the requested information was “confidential”. Essentially, zero transparency.

3. What Cheryl has uncovered is that the community has been misled for years. Instead of acknowledging mistakes or failures, the WCID Manager, and certain board members, have misrepresented facts, by either making untruthful statements, or concealing material facts, such as the cost implications of decisions, as well as following their own agenda, and not the wishes of the WCID members and community.

4. This is the first in a series of posts, which will give you the facts. Each and every statement is backed by evidence, which will be shared in a public Google Drive folder. We are a diverse community, with different viewpoints, but we cannot make decisions as a community when the people in power obtain your “consent” by misrepresenting facts, concealing relevant information, and spreading disinformation.

5. The significant corporate governance failures meant that:

   5.1. The WCID failed to comply with mandatory City of Cape Town requirements;

   5.2. Projects and services were:

   • Delayed,
   • Not executed at all, or
   • Executed in a manner which either did not ensure “value for money” or resulted in wasteful and fruitless expenditure (without disclosing it to the community as they were required to do); and

   5.3. The WCID board failed in its fiduciary duty to act in the WCID’s best interests.

6. The vast majority of additional ratepayers are not members of the WCID Non-Profit Company (“WCID NPC”) and therefore do not vote at AGMs. This is understandable. The WCID does not actively encourage property owners to become NPC members, because taking a large membership will make it difficult to get a quorum at AGMs. Most residents are also busy professionals, trying to juggle work and family commitments. We all simply assumed that the WCID management and Board were acting in good faith, in the best interests of the community, and that they were fulfilling their legal duties. Our trust has been misplaced and abused.

7. The misrepresentations and disinformation were designed to shield the Board and Operations Manager from accountability, and to discredit anyone who dared ask questions or point out WCID failures. Over the years, you may have heard stories about these difficult trouble-makers. You would also have seen recent WCID statements hinting that the community should “ask what they can do” to help the WCID, rather than “just complain”. None of this was by accident. The disinformation caused division in the community, making people more likely to disengage, and less likely to believe those pesky “trouble-makers”.

8. As recently as Monday 19 January 2026, the WCID Manager responded to e-mail queries about the Goewerneur Park upgrade with obfuscation and false statements. The Board appears to endorse this behaviour, as they were copied in on the correspondence, but failed to correct the statements, even though they know the statements were false. The truth will be fully exposed in future posts.

9. The Board and Operations Manager have made it as difficult as possible to access information. This is a well-established strategy by those in power to enable them to hide from accountability. They know that the average person eventually tires of trying to know, and for the sake of their own sanity, just gives up and walks away. Fortunately for this community, Cheryl is not the type of person to give up easily.

10. When the WCID Manager only provided 6 of the approximately 90 documents requested via a PAIA, Cheryl lodged a complaint with the Information Regulator. The WCID is a public body. It uses your additional municipal rate to perform services and to pay salaries. Other than discussions about disciplinary matters, commercially sensitive financial or technical information of third party service providers, there can be little information which can legitimately be labelled as “confidential”. Everything they discuss should be for the benefit of the community, and the records, minutes, etc. should reflect this. And even if a document is confidential, PAIA demands disclosure when it is in the public interest to do so.

11. When the WCID Manager did respond to complaints and PAIAs, sometimes only after 42 days, he did so in a single email response, jumping between various complaints and PAIAs sent on different dates, all in a single email, making it extremely difficult to collate, track and coordinate the responses. We believe this was intentional.

12. To enable Cheryl to keep track of her different complaints and PAIA requests, Cheryl asked the WCID Manager to respond to complaints and PAIA requests in separate emails. Her request was ignored.

13. The process before the Information Regulator is ongoing. We have however managed to accumulate sufficient documentation to conclusively prove and substantiate all our concerns, and will now start posting the information.

14. As you go through the posts, you will also see why the WCID Manager and the Board took the drastic step in January 2026 to take control of independent community WhatsApp groups (the Welgemoed Neighbourhood Watch Groups – WNW groups) instead of creating its own WhatsApp channel/group. These groups had been set up by Cheryl and Oldf Burger, as part of the Welgemoed Neighbourhood Watch (WNW), 3 years before the formation of the WCID.

15. Until now, the WCID manager and WCID Board could post freely on the groups, but did not have the power to remove posts or remove members. However, as residents have increasingly used these groups to share concerns about WCID’s corporate governance failures, the board seized control of the groups in order to limit residents’ freedom of expression and to control the narrative.

16. The WCID wrote to the volunteer administrators (“admins”) of the WNW sector groups, directing them to sign acceptance of the WCID board’s new communication policy and to add the WCID manager as administrator to their groups. Cheryl refused to hand over Sector 2 group, and warned the WCID board and management that without the informed consent of each member of these groups, their takeover violated the POPI Act. Cheryl’s approaches to the Board Chairperson on behalf of the community were rebuffed. The Chairperson of the WCID even went so far as to advise Cheryl that, as Cheryl would not hand her group over to the WCID, “you cannot serve under these circumstances”. The Board Chairperson believes that she has the authority to decide that Cheryl may no longer serve the community.

17. The WCID is a public body. The misrepresentations were made publicly by office bearers of the WCID. The following posts are therefore made in the public interest, in the interests of WCID NPC members, WCID residents and the local community as a whole.

18. Each post will focus on a specific issue, with all relevant documents shared in a publicly available Google Drive folder. Because the volume of the documents may be a bit overwhelming at first, I have prepared a “roadmap” document: “Schedule of PAIA requests and outcomes”. The schedule will be updated after each post.