"Zille means business": Why Joburg's mayoral race is now a turnout war

Helen Zille's social-media-driven campaign has successfully convinced Johannesburg voters the city is broken and the ANC has lost their trust – polling puts the DA near 40%, the ANC in the low-20s. But as Hermann Pretorius writes in this piece for The Daily Friend, analyst Gareth van Onselen's research shows the real battle now is turnout, not diagnosis: the DA needs roughly 500,000 votes to break 50%, in a city where turnout has collapsed and support has fragmented. This piece argues Zille's next move must shift from exposing dysfunction to projecting raw resolve – a "Zille Means Business" message designed to convert sympathy into ballots before apathy hands the ANC another reprieve..By Hermann Pretorius*.Helen Zille’s effort to get elected as the city’s mayor has reached the point where the election is becoming less a contest of diagnosis than a contest of turnout.Over months of genuine innovation in terms of getting politics to escape the mundane realm of public consciousness, the DA in Johannesburg’s much-lauded heavily social-media-based strategy has memorably made the case that Johannesburg is broken.The use of videos and political stunts ranging from a scuba dive in a donga to a paddle in a road has seen Zille’s interest in and diagnosis of the problems faced by Johannesburg become memes in and of themselves.An already established and experienced politician was an unlikely social media innovator, but the strategy has so far defined the contest for the mayoralty of the City of Gold.With good humour and an accessibility previously unlikely to be associated with Zille, she has shown a level of commitment to exposing service delivery failures that few in her line of work have managed: water failures, dead traffic lights, collapsing roads, hijacked buildings, billing chaos, municipal debt, infrastructure decay: all have been subjected to the Zille content machine.This machine has reason to be chuffed: If the DA is sitting, as polling data show and insiders believe, just under 40%, with the ANC in the mid-low 20s, then the Zille campaign has already moved the race beyond the old assumption that Johannesburg is a city waiting for a renewed ANC to return to form. It has become clear that the ANC has lost the argument of trust. Many voters plainly want it out of power. And Zille, through her campaign so far, has come to be the failing city government’s fiercest prosecutor.The voters who can be won over with the argument that “this is how bad things have got” may already be close to exhausted as a source of where additional DA votes can come from. The reality seems to be that the Zille campaign’s current argument probably peaks at somewhere between 38% and 42%.An internal goal for the DA in Johannesburg has been set at 45%, but to reach this point, or to break through and achieve the massively more ambitious target of an outright majority, Zille now needs to do something harder than prove that Johannesburg is in crisis and that she’s invested in it. These things her campaign has done. Zille now needs to make Johannesburg voters believe that a ballot cast for her is the shortest route between the broken city they know and the working city they want.Gareth van Onselen’s recent analysis of the race helps explain why.Zille’s arithmeticHe accepts Zille’s arithmetic that, if the DA can get just under 500,000 votes in Johannesburg, the party can breach 50% support, especially in an environment where overall turnout has fallen. But Van Onselen also points out the core difficulty: the 500,000 target is mathematically sound, but politically demanding.Because although those voters exist, and the DA won about 486,000 votes in Johannesburg in 2016, the city’s electoral environment has changed. Turnout has gone through the floor, voters have become alienated, and the vote has fragmented into smaller and smaller patches. Johannesburg politics is no longer a normal two-party contest with a few protest options attached.This means, as correctly observed by Van Onselen, that the election has essentially become a turnout game in a very specific sense. Van Onselen argues that the DA’s campaign ought to be fundamentally focused on getting people already in the DA’s potential voting population to vote, rather than relying mainly on the conversion of large numbers of new voters.As Van Onselen notes, in 2016, the DA’s core support base across the central, southern and northern suburban belt was highly motivated, while the party also managed to get 7% to 8% in places like Soweto and Alexandra. Since then, both sides of that equation have weakened. The base has been reduced, and the DA’s support in places like Soweto has fallen closer to 4%. The DA does not have one neat geographic hole to plug. It needs a universal uplift.Voters who are already broadly on board still need a compelling reason to interrupt their lives and vote, especially if they believe Zille is already ahead. Waverers who want the ANC out still need a reason to stop hedging between the DA and other parties or staying home. For Zille to break the dangerous emerging stalemate, her campaign has to make the ballot feel consequential enough to turn agreement into action.For that to happen, diagnosis and conceptual cure are no longer enough. An escalation of intensity is necessary: an escalation that connects the conclusion of ANC failure, the weakened hope for change, the potency of a turnaround message, the usurping power of the ballot, and Zille’s own political strength and character. In a sense, Zille now needs a “Fight Back” ferocity of focus.Crystal clear“Believe in Joburg” has got the campaign this far, but the practicalities of that belief must now become crystal clear. And it can be done with three words: “Zille Means Business.”“Believe in Joburg” says the city can still become more than its decline. “Zille Means Business” says the belief, backed by the ballot, has muscle and teeth. Its message is that the campaign is not asking voters to admire Johannesburg’s potential from a distance, nor to accept another round of managerial promises from a party system that has already produced paralysis.Instead, it claims that the way to make belief real is to put Zille in charge: Zille as the standout candidate in the race with the public reputation, temperament and record to confront the systems and interests that keep Johannesburg broken. The time has come for her reputation as an “iron lady” that does nothing “without a fight” to be the unapologetic focus of her message.When someone “means business”, South Africans understand that the person simmers with a pugnacity, a restlessness, an inability to accept failure, a sheer bloody-mindedness that business as usual has gone out the window. With this intensity, Zille’s campaign message needs to essentially boil down to what can coarsely be worded in Afrikaans as “Moer hulle, Zille”.An added part of the “Zille means business” message, beyond capturing the fight many South Africans, even opponents, have come to admire Zille for, is that the socio-economic aspect of resurrecting a city like Johannesburg is conveniently baked into it.Grabbing the incompetent administration of the city by the scruff of the neck, handing out a few ruthless blows, and setting things right will, through the eventual realisation of better services, literally mean business. A city needs services to get investment, investment to get jobs, and jobs to afford services. At some point in the downward spiral of failed local government, someone must mean business.Most important insightPerhaps Van Onselen’s most important insight is that Zille is, by some distance, the most powerful brand in the Johannesburg election. It is because there is an unusually strong overlap between the nature of Johannesburg’s crisis and the nature of Zille’s reputation.Her brand is that of a politician who has faced such things before, forced them back into working order, and refused to treat administrative collapse as inevitable. That is why even some voters who are typically opposed to her may be willing to vote DA in this case. Their calculation is practical rather than ideological: they want the place to work.That is exactly the voter Zille’s team now needs to mobilise.These voters are asking whether a ballot-backed DA can actually make the change happen, whether Zille has enough force to beat the interests that benefit from collapse, and whether voting for her will produce more than another round of coalition bargaining. To these voters, “Zille Means Business” must mean that this election is about putting a strong mayor in charge of the city’s rescue, even if they are not lifelong DA voters and do not intend to become DA people in any broader sense.For the existing DA base, the same message works, but does so slightly differently. It tells them that a 40% support level at this stage of the campaign is a fight that is winnable – and a fight Zille has no intention of not winning.As Zille herself has argued, a voter who “likes Zille”, agrees Johannesburg is broken, wants the ANC out, and then stays home because the DA seems comfortably ahead, is helping to recreate the same council arithmetic that has made Johannesburg so unstable.It is also right, as Van Onselen points out, that the biggest party, and by how much it is bigger than its main rivals after an election, carries substantial informal power in coalition negotiations, even if it falls short of 51%. That means every extra DA vote matters twice: it helps the DA get closer to its possible ceiling or even outright control, and, failing that, strengthens Zille’s hand in the negotiations that would follow.PotentThis is where the “Zille Means Business” message becomes potent for the DA’s current 40% bloc. It is a mobilisation message. It tells DA voters that their task is to give Zille enough power to act, and it tells waverers that their task is to stop the anti-ANC vote from being wasted in ways that leave Johannesburg trapped.Van Onselen notes that Johannesburg faces two layers of problems. The first involves the basics: refuse collection, roads, lights, water, billing and the standard functions any metro should deliver. The second involves deeper questions of investment, infrastructure spending and long-term strategy for the metro. His warning is that competence has been elevated over long-term vision, while Johannesburg needs both.“Zille means business” carries both layers in one phrase. It speaks to the immediate and uncompromising restoration of basic municipal command, and it speaks to the larger economic purpose of making Johannesburg a city where businesses invest, workers move, families feel safe, and young people can see a future..Read more:.Helen Zille: Joburg’s fairytale budget - the madness has to stop now.A “Zille means business” message is the campaign’s strongest possible escalation because it shortens the distance between now and the future. It is also how Zille can become central without the campaign becoming a cult of personality.The point is not that voters must back Zille because she is well-known, formidable or controversial. The point is that Johannesburg’s crisis now requires the traits for which she is known: confrontation, discipline, administrative seriousness, an almost uniquely Germanic intensity, refusal to indulge failure, and the ability to make comfortable insiders uncomfortable.A weak campaign would ask voters to admire those traits. A strong campaign asks voters to use them..*Hermann Pretorius studied law and opera before entering politics and, latterly, joining the IRR as an analyst. He is presently the IRR’s Head of Strategic Communications. He describes himself as a Protestant, landless, Anglophilic, Afrikaans classical liberal. Pretorius is the author of Rule Breakers: How the 2024 Election Campaign Changed South Africa Forever (Protea, 2025)..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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.

"Zille means business": Why Joburg's mayoral race is now a turnout war

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