Justice Malala: An Iron Lady and a billionaire signal South Africa’s political maturity

Key topics:Zille’s mayoral bid taps anger over Joburg’s collapseVoters shift toward pragmatism over ANC ideologyMotsepe push signals business-friendly ANC future.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..By Justice Malala.As election stunts go, it was pretty tame. Last week, with temperatures in Johannesburg reaching 31 degrees Celsius (88 Fahrenheit) and the city’s taps running dry due to government mismanagement, 74-year-old Helen Zille — de facto leader of South Africa’s center-right Democratic Alliance (DA) party — dunked herself in a large pool of water gushing from a burst pipe in the middle of a suburban street. The gag was so well-timed that Zille came across not just as brilliant for staging it, but as a politician who understands the angry mood of the nation. She spoke for a frustrated city whose residents were that day out in numbers protesting water shortages when she bellowed: “We are losing millions of liters to waste and leaks and bad infrastructure…. Could Joburg Water just fix the infrastructure!” Zille is a combative veteran opposition politician and an effective administrator, often referred to as “the Iron Lady.” She defeated the African National Congress to become mayor of Cape Town in 2006, and whupped Nelson Mandela’s party again for the Western Cape region of the country in 2009. Now, she wants to unseat the ANC from the mayorship of Johannesburg, Africa’s richest city, in local elections to be held later this year. .Read more:.The restaurant test and why Zille changes everything in Joburg: Daniel Schay.If there’s a city begging to be saved, it’s Johannesburg. Residents daily contend with dry taps, sewage spills, power cuts and crumbling infrastructure while informal settlements, crime and unemployment swell. Herman Mashaba, an ex-mayor who’s running again this year, declared recently: “Everything in the city of Joburg is broken.” This is where Zille’s run for mayor is a game changer. In a country still dominated by reminders of its apartheid past and where voting patterns have mimicked past racial divisions 32 years after democracy was implemented, one would expect Zille, who is White, to lose to a Black candidate. She has, for example, sent polarising posts on X claiming that colonialism was not all negative (she later apologized). Despite this history, prominent political analysts such as Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh reckon Johannesburg’s mostly Black electorate may vote for her. Her party’s internal polls — the only ones currently available — put her ahead of the ANC. Prominent left-wing thinkers such as Adam Habib, former principal of the University of the Witwatersrand and vice-chancellor of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and others have endorsed her candidacy. Their reasoning is simple: Voters want reliable utilities, clean streets, safety and jobs. Zille’s delivered that: When running Cape Town between 2006 and 2009, she won the 2008 World Mayor of the Year Award for improved service delivery, crime reduction and attracting investment. As governor of the Western Cape province, her office was rated best of all nine in South Africa in 2012 by the Public Service Commission. As Zille’s campaign gains steam, it illustrates a growing pragmatism in South African politics: People want capable leaders, not the ineffective ideology that has been the ANC’s stock-in-trade for 32 years. It’s a trend that started in 2016 when the ANC lost majority control of the main cities of Johannesburg, Tshwane (Pretoria), Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town. An even more interesting election underlining this shift is playing out inside the ANC itself. Sections of the party are rolling out a campaign for the self-made dollar billionaire Patrice Motsepe — holder of large stakes in financial-services company Sanlam Ltd., Tyme Bank Ltd. owner African Rainbow Capital and Mamelodi Sundowns Football Club — to take over party leadership next year and run for president in 2029. Should he win, Motsepe will be unlike any ANC leader before him. He’ll will be the first in the democracy era to not have been in prison (like Mandela), not to have been exiled (like presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma), or prominent in internal anti-apartheid structures (like current President Cyril Ramaphosa). He’s unbothered by his ties with many of South Africa’s White business titans, often derided as “White monopoly capital” by the ANC and its ally, the SA Communist Party. A corporate lawyer who did stints at international law firm McGuireWoods in the 1990s, Motsepe comes from an entrepreneurial family and made his fortune turning around marginal mines that no one else would touch. His supporters say he wants to turn South Africa into an economic powerhouse like Singapore. A pragmatist who got pilloried in 2020 after he told US President Donald Trump at a Davos dinner that “Africa loves you,” his lobbyists say he wants to energize industrialisation efforts and address chronic joblessness. That may mean more business-friendly policy to address ills like the country’s 31.4% unemployment rate. .Read more:.TCS: What South Africa might look like under a Motsepe-led ANC.Motsepe’s ascent also underlines another encouraging aspect of South Africa’s political development: Should he prevail, he’ll be the fifth ANC president – and the sixth state president - in 35 years. In a region where presidents for life are sadly still common, this is a remarkable testament to the strengthening of South African democracy. It’s also possible that the ANC will — as some polls predict — lose in 2029, ushering in a totally new era in which Zille may become the nation’s leader. With Zille and Motsepe’s campaigns, South Africa is continuing to shed extremist ideology for pragmatism, to widen its electoral choices beyond narrow racial divides and to strengthen its democracy by changing its leaders often, peacefully — and democratically. .© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Justice Malala: An Iron Lady and a billionaire signal South Africa’s political maturity

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