Helen Zille and the vision to transform Johannesburg’s future: Sindile Vabaza

Key topics:

• Informal inner-city economies in Joburg generate massive trade beyond formal markets.

• South Africa’s entrepreneurship is low due to overregulation and government obstacles.

• Helen Zille’s potential Joburg governance could revitalize infrastructure and hidden economies.

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By Sindile Vabaza*

In her evocative and visually stirring book, Wake Up, This Is Joburg, produced in collaboration with photographer Mark Lewis, urban planner Tanya Zack takes the reader on a journey through Johannesburg’s inner city.

It’s a journey told through ten stories, each with an idiosyncratic title.

S’kop, for example, tells the story of informal butchers who chop cow heads in a disused parking garage in the heart of the city to service formal butcheries nearby, the heads being delivered to them in trolleys. Every part of the head is used for something, from the bone − crushed into bonemeal – to the skin, which, through a unique process, is rendered edible.

S’kop describes the kind of informal value-chain Zack has examined in her other work over the years, especially on the inner city’s “hidden economy”. 

The same is true of Zack’s research on cross-border shoppers: mainly women from surrounding countries  buying up fast fashion and household wares in old disused buildings repurposed for retail on a massive scale.

In 2017 when the research was conducted, Zack and her team conservatively estimated that trade worth over R10 billion was done within this informal retail economy every single year: a figure almost four times as large as the business done in Sandton City, Africa’s most profitable regional mall. 

It is why Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie’s claims about unemployment, even if they are disputed, are well worth listening to, not just for the numbers, but also for how they could inform policy around the inner-city part of South Africa’s richest city.

Low rate of entrepreneurship

South Africa has an incredibly low rate of entrepreneurship relative to its economic peers.

In an article written in the Daily Friend titled, SA entrepreneurship lags among emerging market peers, the author notes:

“IRR analysts note that South Africa’s established and prospective entrepreneurs are compelled to function in an overregulated sector burdened by government red tape that makes creating a business a protracted, complex and expensive endeavour.  Many in government pay lip service to the struggles facing small businesses in South Africa. But the government continues to drag its feet in removing the obstacles to success. At the same time, many government officials advocate state-driven job creation, emphasising employment in state-owned enterprises as a solution to the country’s unemployment problem.”

Another story in Zack’s book, called Bedroom, tells the story of Birthial Gxaleka, a nurse from the Eastern Cape who runs an NGO and shelter from her one-bedroom apartment in Hillbrow, where up to 34 people at a time can be found living and sleeping. This story is not unusual for inner-city Joburg, which has a density ten times higher than Hong Kong, as people come streaming in from other provinces searching for opportunities and loved ones and looking to make a better life for themselves.

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This is the city that Helen Zille will be looking to govern if she wins the local elections in 2026. Many others will have noted the obvious deficiencies in Joburg around infrastructure and services, and that is something Zille shone at in her time as Cape Town mayor between 2006 and 2009. She was eventually lauded by Princeton University’s Innovation for Successful Societies with the following:

“In March 2006, the Democratic Alliance won elections in the city of Cape Town, taking over administrative and political control of the municipality following four years of rule by the African National Congress, South Africa’s dominant party. Helen Zille, Cape Town’s new mayor, stepped into a difficult situation. Crumbling infrastructure had eroded service delivery for years, undermining public confidence in the city government and jeopardizing the long-term economic prospects of the Cape Town metropolitan area. Lacking the revenue and administrative capacity to address Cape Town’s infrastructure crisis, and facing a politically charged racial climate, Zille and her Democratic Alliance government initiated a package of innovative and far-reaching reforms. This case study recounts these efforts from 2006 to 2009, and describes how tough decisions to raise local revenue interacted with a program to stabilize an underskilled and demoralized city bureaucracy, reversing Cape Town’s precipitous decline.”

Agile mind

Zille’s job, were she to win, would also encompass her needing to employ her agile mind and governance skills not only to combat a stifling regulatory environment that suffocates entrepreneurship and aspiration, but also to harness the already evident but “hidden” economy in the inner city.

She would need to marshal landlords, property investors and inner-city residents and other stakeholders in an effort to reclaim and repurpose inner-city buildings for light manufacturing (those cross-border goods should be made in Joburg too). They should also position the city to aid rather than stifle and overregulate this burgeoning value chain and economy to create even more jobs.

Perhaps if Zille wins, and some other DA mayors can get a mandate (a clear majority) in Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay, they could finally devolve policing. This would greatly increase safety throughout Joburg and especially the inner city, which would be a boon for trade, as many cross-border shoppers have expressed a desire to also enjoy the city but were too scared, because of violent crime and corrupt police soliciting bribes.

Reviving Africa’s greatest city would be the magnum opus of a sparkling governance career, and, as Frans Cronje has noted in interviews, could very well swing the 2029 elections right around, with the DA going as high as the early 40s percentage-wise and the ANC dropping into the mid-20s.

For those of us who love Johannesburg and love South Africa it is a tantalising prospect, and one we must be sure to canvass for.

*Sindile Vabaza is an avid writer and an aspiring economist.

This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission