Listen here.Helen Zille has swapped the Iron Lady tag for "DJ Gogo", but the numbers she puts on the table are dead serious. In this conversation with Alec Hogg, she says Johannesburg only spent half of an eight billion rand infrastructure budget last year, warns that DA supporters staying home on election day could hand the city to the ANC, and lays out exactly how vote-buying has turned South African coalition politics into what one commentator called "auctions". She also responds directly to the lobbying row involving John Steenhuisen and Tony Leon, explains the real mechanics behind uMngeni's 42-vote nail-biter, and says plainly why she believes this election is Joburg's last chance to turn itself around..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg: Well, she used to be called the Iron Lady of the Democratic Alliance. She's now the DJ Gogo. A change in branding, or is it for real? Helen Zille, lovely seeing you again. It's been a journey, this campaign you've been on, abseiling down buildings in Johannesburg. Is this for real? Have you really changed from being the Iron Lady to, well, pretty cool?Helen Zille: It's amazing how the media like to caricature a person. They take one small aspect of your personality and make that the totality. I've always liked fun. I've always liked to push the limits. Abseiling down buildings is perfectly in character for me.Alec Hogg: It is, yeah. And I can say that from experience, having once worked with you when you were the hot young thing in the newsroom at the Rand Daily Mail. My goodness, it goes back a long time. And now, Helen, the campaign, how's it going? How close do you feel to victory?Helen Zille: Thanks, Alec. Well, we've moved to the next stage of our campaign, which is to show DA delivery. Now, we're not in government, we don't have access to the public purse, we don't have access to a huge bureaucracy, we can't use any line of authority or anything like that. But we started off with 17 wards in which we have teams, really great teams, that are on the ground fixing stuff. Anything we can fix. Obviously we can't fix a main sewer line, obviously we can't fix overhead electric cables and stuff like that, but anything visible, from a pothole to broken windows, that we can fix, we are fixing. You'll see a lot in this campaign that we put up before-and-after pictures. We've got the Blue Bucket Brigade that is out there, doing their thing, and doing it very effectively. So we're delighted that they're doing this.Alec Hogg: That Blue Bucket Brigade, I remember Frans Cronje suggesting something along those lines. Did you listen to that, or was it in gestation already?Helen Zille: Yes indeed, yes indeed. Frans had this idea for a long time, and the question was, could we raise the money for it, and could we get the logistics organised, because it's a huge logistical exercise. You've got to make sure you've got all the equipment, the transport, the teams, the resources to pay them, the management of the system. That's why governments are built to do all of that very complex logistics. It's not for political parties to get up and do them. So we've put a lot of effort into planning. We've got this really good manager called Gert Niemand, and he's been helping us a lot with setting all of this up. It takes management, it takes direction, it takes training, everything. But it's all up and running now, and I'm very pleased that it is. When people give me good ideas, from whatever source, I try to implement them if we can.Alec Hogg: Thinking back to the time Herman Mashaba was mayor of Joburg. He came from outside politics, straight into the mayorship. Did you play much of a role then in helping him identify what needed to be done? Because clearly, in politics, he's now going to take credit for everything that happened at that time. I'd love to get behind the scenes a bit there.Helen Zille: What I did was play a very big role in making sure he could become our mayor and our mayoral candidate at the time. I didn't really know him that well. I thought, here's an entrepreneur who's really made it big, and he must have what it takes. Unfortunately, I've come to different conclusions since then. Look, the legacy of Herman Mashaba is not the legacy he claims. But I'm not going out there to bash my opponents. I'm going out there to say what we can do, and to demonstrate what we can do. I don't want to pick fights. I want to focus on the voters. Politics is not something that happens between politicians. It is not determined by whether you're slagging off your opponent hard enough. That's not the issue in the election. The issue in the election is whether people get water, or electricity, or drivable roads, or whether corruption stops. All of those are the huge issues, as well as, over time, getting new jobs. Those are the issues, and I want to make the issues the issue. Me slagging off Herman Mashaba is not the issue, and the same goes for all the other candidates. Obviously, if they've been corrupt I point it out, if they've done jobs for cadres and pals I've pointed it out, as I have with Herman, obviously. But the focus of my campaign is to show what we can do, not to say how bad everyone else is.Alec Hogg: What about the point we discussed a while back, that it's actually up to the DA voting public coming out? So those DA voters who would naturally support your campaign, if they stay at home thinking, "Helen's going to win anyway", that could actually cost you the election. How has that message resonated with those people so far?Helen Zille: I think it's starting to penetrate, I think it's starting to penetrate. I keep saying that our biggest threat in this election is not the ANC, or the EFF, or ActionSA, or any other party. Our biggest threat is people who support the DA inherently, or who are close to the DA in their ideological point of view, but who decide not to vote, for one reason or another. People write to me saying, "I'm going to be overseas at the time, where can I vote abroad?" Well, you can't. You can only vote at the voting station where you're registered. Which brings me to the huge problem of people not being registered in the right place. As you'll have seen, we've run a huge registration campaign trying to get everybody to check their registration by going to check.da.org.za and following the prompts. Then they'll see if they're registered at the place where they plan to vote, because if not, they must fix it. The reason is you don't want to stand in a queue for two hours on election day, get to the front, and be told, "Sorry, you can't vote here, you're not registered at this voting station, go to another one." And then no one wants to stand in another queue for two hours. That's why we're telling people, even if you know you're registered, make sure you're registered in the right place.But our biggest threat is among registered voters who say, "The DA always wins my ward, even if only 20 people voted the DA would win anyway, so I don't really have to bother, someone else will do it." That's a complete, 100% misunderstanding of how the voting works. Firstly, you get two votes: a ward vote and a party-list vote. The mayor is actually elected from the party-list vote, not the ward vote. So people have to vote twice, once for their ward and once for the list. But the important thing about the ward vote is that it also gets counted a second time: it's added to the list votes at that voting station, to make a total that's added to the grand total. And the percentage the DA gets of that grand total is the percentage of the 270 council seats we get. We want to win 136 seats if we can. It's going to be a stretch, but we can, if every DA supporter registers and votes on election day at the right voting station. That would give us 50% plus one, which guarantees a stable, DA-led government for the full five years from 2026.Alec Hogg: Let's dig into that a bit more. Say you're a Freedom Front supporter, and you're in a ward, and you've got a candidate you know and want to vote for, but you know they're not going to win. If you vote for your candidate in the ward for the Freedom Front, but then on the party list you vote for the DA, say, because you want the DA's candidate as mayor rather than whoever the Freedom Front's mayoral candidate might be, is that a possibility? Should voters be looking at that as a kind of strategic vote?Helen Zille: People can do that, people can do that. But we would really like to appeal to people not to leave us with unwieldy coalitions. There are only two parties that can win this election: the DA, and the ANC. For every person who gives even a ward vote to another party, it makes it more possible the ANC could emerge as the biggest party, and it matters to be the biggest party. So, in your hypothetical example, if a person votes for the Freedom Front candidate in their ward, that counts once for the Freedom Front, and then it's added a second time to the Freedom Front's grand total from that ward. So we lose two votes through that: we lose the ward vote, and we lose the second count towards the total. When people vote for a ward councillor who isn't DA, they're actually costing us a significant number of votes on the grand total, which we need to be bigger than the ANC's. And we crucially need, if we can possibly get it, to avoid these unwieldy, terrible coalitions, where you have to try to survive from council meeting to council meeting, where motions of no confidence come thick and fast, where you can't implement your turnaround strategy, because there's always one little party that doesn't like it, and always one person threatening to vote the other way in council, and then you lose.And, you know, we talk about coalitions as if they're a done deal in South Africa. We don't have a culture in South Africa that supports coalitions. Tragically, the ANC has introduced, at a fundamental level, a culture of vote-buying in South Africa. And it doesn't only limit itself to vote-buying at ANC elective conferences. As we all know, almost 400 million rand changed hands in the contest between Cyril Ramaphosa and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as they tried to buy delegates and their votes. But the ANC has also transported that into our councils. So they say to the smaller parties, "Well, you can make the ANC the biggest party, you can give us the mayor, you can give us access to all the tenders and contracts." So, how much is it worth to you to go into a coalition with the ANC rather than the DA? There's a notorious case involving a building referred to here as "Proton House", where money was allegedly laundered through the Johannesburg Property Company, allegedly to fix a building that the ANC-led Johannesburg administration was moving out of. And they allegedly bought a number of councillors to cross the floor, and they did that. We had a whistleblower who told us the full story. That's how it happens: vote-buying. Now, you cannot run stable coalitions in a culture of vote-buying, because the smaller parties — not all of them, I must stress, not all of them, but some — will play one big party off against another and say, "Well, they've offered me this, what are you going to offer me?" We don't play that game in the DA. That's corruption, and we don't do it. But then we can never hold coalitions together, for obvious reasons.Alec Hogg: The late R.W. Johnson, it's so sad that he passed away yesterday, used to call those ANC —Helen Zille: I'm so sorry to hear that. This is the first time I'm hearing that.Alec Hogg: Yeah, it came as a surprise, and we've got something on that separately. But Helen, he used to call those ANC electoral conferences — they weren't elections, he used to call them auctions.Helen Zille: Well, absolutely, that's exactly what they were. And coalitions have become auctions as well.Alec Hogg: Sure. So, there's still a long way to go to the election in November, but last time we spoke you were polling at 39%. Any update on that?Helen Zille: Yes, we're now just over 40% at the moment, but that's not big enough, that's not big enough. And our biggest threat still comes from DA supporters who don't think they should go out and vote, who'll "be somewhere else" on election day, whatever. Often I go to places and people invite me to talk, but they say, "Please don't mention the DA." I say, well, you're inviting the DA's mayoral candidate to come and talk, what do you think I'm going to talk about? "No, we want to know about this part of your history." And I say, listen, we're facing the most important election Joburg has faced in this democracy. This is Joburg's last chance. This election isn't about Helen Zille, and it's not about DA candidates, it's about whether Joburg is salvageable.And when the stakes are so high, you've got to understand what politics really is about. People don't want politics, and I often say to people, you may not do politics, but when you look at all the service-delivery collapse around you that impacts your life directly, politics is actually doing you. That's a consequence of the way people voted. Cape Town is the way it is, and is regularly voted one of the top cities in the world, because 20 years ago enough voters decided to make a choice for their city's success. And Joburg is an abject failure because a majority of voters, for 30 years, have — even if they don't realise it — chosen for their city to fail. In this election, people surely must get it: the choice for Joburg is between continued failure and complete unravelling on the one side, or accepting the challenge and the long, hard climb to recovery on the other. Those are the options, and they affect every single person. It's not as if Zille and the other candidates are out there looking for jobs, and you're going to vote to help some DA people get jobs — that is what's in some people's heads elections are, and it is not. We go through such a rigorous selection process for our councillors that I can tell you every one of them could get a job elsewhere that would be far less taxing than working through the nights, working seven days a week, being at the pump station at half past eleven to make sure the water comes on so that Linden High School can go to school because there's no water — and doing that all over the place. That is what the councillor's job is, and it's grueling, and it gets attacked all the time by everybody. This is not about getting jobs for people in the DA. It's about making a choice for yourself. Are you going to be able to live in a livable city? Is your property going to be worth anything?Make the choice for yourself, I say to people. If you have to envisage a future with intermittent water, intermittent electricity, roads you can't drive on, broken sewers — we saw a complete Niagara Falls of sewage this past week — if that's the choice for yourself, then that's the choice for yourself. If you'd like to live in a city with reliable services, make the choice for yourself. It's a big choice, a crucial choice, and it's your last choice, because it's not going to be fixable later on.Alec Hogg: It's a point that's been driven home for me by an interview I had with another one of your young lions, Chris Pappas, who was leaving the scene. I have family in that area in the Midlands and spent a lot of time there, and the feedback we were getting was very negative — that he was stepping down, and people were heartbroken, because uMngeni has been a huge success, and there are all kinds of stats to support that. But he changed his mind. He told me he'd had a chat with Geordin. Did he have a chat with you as well?Helen Zille: Several, several, several chats with me. But what's very important for people to remember is that Chris won by 42 votes. That's what he won by, 42 votes. And now people are desperate that he should keep on being their mayor, and he scraped home last time on the narrowest of margins.Alec Hogg: It's a great template for you. He was explaining that the infrastructure budget at uMngeni, which he said is the 34th-biggest municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, is the third-biggest in the whole province, because they've been governing it correctly. That's the kind of stat that has to get through to people, apart from the fact that they're now living in a town that is livable. What about Joburg? How much can Joburg improve? Take the infrastructure budget, for instance.Helen Zille: Well, Joburg is bankrupt. Joburg is bankrupt. Just take tiny things, like the pothole patrol filling a pothole for five thousand rand, with everything taken into account — wages, fuel, vehicles. Johannesburg spends about fifty thousand rand per pothole. Just multiply that across an entire system, and you'll see what we're talking about. Joburg's expenditure on infrastructure is actually criminal. In the last financial year they had eight billion rand budgeted for infrastructure. Eight billion rand. They only spent half of that — four billion rand. Cape Town's infrastructure budget was more than Joburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane put together. You have to prioritise infrastructure, otherwise your services collapse, it's a day-follows-night thing — although in this case, more like a dark night following day. And people don't get that.This vandalism of infrastructure is at another level in Joburg, it really is. But let me leave that for a moment and say again: Joburg only spent half its infrastructure budget in the last financial year, and that's often because corrupt people cancel tenders if their preferred contractor doesn't get the tender, and then they start again to try to manipulate it in the right direction. So when a contract gets cancelled because the "right" person didn't get it, that money goes unspent, even though there are very high levels of corruption — and because of the high levels of corruption, ironically. Now, in Cape Town, Geordin has budgeted 40 billion rand over the next three years for infrastructure, 75% of which goes to the poorest areas. That's in Cape Town, under Geordin Hill-Lewis. And we spent half our infrastructure budget in the city with the biggest infrastructure challenge. It's criminal.Alec Hogg: We've spoken about the good news, Chris Pappas, and the problems. What about this whole John Steenhuisen, Tony Leon story, the allegations that the "clean party" is actually very dirty? What do you make of it, and how will it impact your mayoral bid?Helen Zille: Tony Leon started one of the first lobbying companies in South Africa, going back to the time of Helen Suzman. I remember her saying it's absolutely amazing that we don't have lobbying in South Africa. In America there are hundreds, probably thousands, of lobbying firms, and it's part of democratic politics as long as it's regulated and above board. What would be totally wrong is if a lobbying company that knew a minister went to that minister and said, "You have to do this for this client" — there's no way any minister should be told, "you have to do this and this is what it is." The risk is that if people aren't honest, they'll be promised a kickback from the contract, which is why you have to have proper regulation.In Tony's case, as I understand it, he was acting for an organisation trying to get policy changed on foot-and-mouth disease. Tony and his company, Resolve Communications, took the contract and sought to lobby for the change. When John [Steenhuisen] realised, he was furious, and saw it as a personal betrayal. But a personal betrayal is not corruption, and we've always got to understand the fundamental difference between a betrayal and corruption. In politics, you can't look at it in terms of betrayal, because — as we keep saying, and as Geordin has said repeatedly — politics is not what happens between politicians, it's what happens in service of the voter. You can't go into politics thinking these people are your friends forever and whatever you do, they'll back you. They won't. They didn't back me, as you know very well. And in politics, if people don't agree with you, even in your own party, they say so, so you can't see that as a betrayal. There's no evidence anyone was bribed, or that money changed hands, or anything like that. I do think we need a bill regulating lobbying in South Africa, I think that's true. But as long as there's no undue influence, no conflict of interest, that sort of thing — although there does need to be regulation of conflicts of interest and other issues, and I think that's probably coming.Alec Hogg: Lots of people don't quite get what conflicts of interest are. In our own industry, journalism, we get a lot of information that sometimes bad actors use to profit personally, brown envelopes and so on — it's all over the place. But it's interesting you mention lobbyists. There are 30,000 of them in Washington, would you believe, that's a Warren Buffett figure, and K Street in Washington is basically a lobbying city.Helen Zille: Absolutely, absolutely.Alec Hogg: It's part of the democratic process over there. Here, because we don't have regulations, there'll always be public suspicion. But looking at the impact on you of all this, of the media coverage, I get what you're saying, but is it hurting you?Helen Zille: Look, it obviously isn't helpful. But Geordin was decisive. He showed he puts the voters first. He showed poor performance won't be tolerated, and that's what you can expect from a political leader. You can't expect there'll never be poor performance or misdirection in any political party anywhere in the world, because we're human beings and we make mistakes. The question is: what does a leader do when things are going in the wrong direction? And I think you look at Geordin, he put his friendship with John aside and said, "This is what I must do," and that is political leadership.Alec Hogg: But keeping him on as a deputy minister?Helen Zille: Well, that was, I agree, a soft landing, but nowhere near as soft a landing as the ANC would have given someone. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, or even suggestion, that John was corrupt, that John was bought — I've not heard any such suggestion, it's not there. He followed a policy that many of us in the DA didn't agree with, and told him so. He was advised in a particular way, and pursued it. In the end he lost a court case very badly on that, and there were significant consequences for the agricultural sector too. And Geordin said enough. So it's not as if he's a Dina Pule, or one of those figures who've clearly been shown to be corrupt. It's a very different situation. One thing John did do very well in his portfolio was get a lot of trade deals done with a range of countries for South Africa's stone fruit and other agricultural products. He did a lot of that, which is why I think he's quite appropriately placed as deputy minister of trade and industry.Alec Hogg: It's a complicated world, and there would be those who'd say he threw a lot of people under the bus in his interviews and came across as self-absorbed, but whatever — the reality is it isn't helpful, but you say it's not hurting your campaign.Helen Zille: Well, I've got no benchmark, no control group, so I can't say what it would have been otherwise. We're polling far better than we've ever done in the past, and better than the ANC — that's a first for us in our history. But we don't want to drop, we don't want to fall back. These negative things aren't helpful. We've still got to grow a lot more to be sure of a stable DA government in Joburg.Alec Hogg: What are you going to do in the next few months to get it over the line, to get to 45% plus?Helen Zille: What we've got to do is keep showing that every vote does count, which I do on every occasion. Show that politics is not a fight between politicians, it's a choice you make for yourself, and that political choice determines the future of your town and city, which has huge implications for future generations, for the economy of South Africa as a whole, and especially for the poorest of the poor. And we've moved phases in our campaign, from showing what's wrong — although we'll still continue to do that, just perhaps with less of a strong focus — to showing how we can actually fix things. That's what we want to do, even when we're not in government, without the human and material resources of government.Alec Hogg: That by-election win in Emfuleni, in the black township?Helen Zille: That was fabulous. That was Maki Tshabalala. She gave us a great win there. Maki was just the kind of candidate we need: a community person, hard-working, on the ground, honest, rolls up her sleeves, responsive. That's what we need.Alec Hogg: How many "Makis" have you got in Joburg?Helen Zille: Well, this election will tell, but I think we'll have some pleasant surprises on the fifth of November.Alec Hogg: And Helen, generally for the DA — hopefully from your perspective, with Chris Pappas deciding not to go to the private sector, you'll retain uMngeni, and you'll have that at least as a majority municipality in KZN. Are there others you see coming in KZN, or perhaps in other parts of the country?Helen Zille: Well, I hope so. We've got a big new challenge in KZN which wasn't there in 2021, and that's MK. MK just beat us in the national election if you disaggregate uMngeni out of the equation — if you take uMngeni out of the provincial result and look just at the votes in uMngeni, MK just beat us there too. So again, in uMngeni, every single vote will count. You can't say, "Well, Chris Pappas did a great job for five years and everyone loves him," and just leave it there. There's no such thing as a safe seat. Every vote counts. You have two votes, counted three times [as described earlier]. Don't cost the DA votes through the fallacy that you only need to vote for a ward councillor. That is wrong.Alec Hogg: So those elderly folk who stood in queues until late in the evening, some with Zimmer frames, need to get those Zimmer frames out again and get to the polling station on the fourth of November, because even in uMngeni it's going to be a tough task.Helen Zille: Yes, absolutely. And if you've got a Zimmer frame, book yourself a special vote. The election is always on a Wednesday — Wednesday the 4th of November. Special votes are on the 2nd and 3rd of November, the Monday and Tuesday before. They haven't opened special votes for application yet, but please ask your councillor if you need a special vote, just to get one for you. If you're really bedridden and can't move, the IEC will come to you. Otherwise, you just go to your voting station on the 2nd or the 3rd and cast your ballot — not twice, obviously, just once. And if for some reason you couldn't get to the voting station on the 2nd or the 3rd, then just go on the Wednesday, the 4th, and they'll still take your vote.Alec Hogg: That's great, practical advice. To close off with another controversial issue: you picked up flak for meeting with, I believe, Duduzile Zuma [name unconfirmed — see flagged items above]. What was your thinking behind that, and has it —Helen Zille: Well, I would meet her again. I'm the mayoral candidate for Joburg, and I meet people across the board all the time. I listen to them, and they may or may not listen to me, and I hear what they've got to say and where they're coming from. It doesn't mean I go there and sign a membership form or anything like that. I believe in meeting people, including people who don't agree with us in any way. I listen to them, and I give them my perspective, or our perspective as a party — much more important — and explain where we're coming from and why. Nothing wrong with that in politics.Alec Hogg: So just talking straight.Helen Zille: Absolutely, I've always done it. I don't know what the fuss was about.Alec Hogg: Helen Zille, mayoral candidate for the Democratic Alliance in Johannesburg. I'm Alec Hogg, from BizNews.com.Helen Zille: Thanks very much.