John Matisonn: What a Zille mayor would mean for SA

Key topics:Helen Zille aims to revive Johannesburg and reshape SA politics and economy.Key challenge: win black voter trust and build coalition to oust ANC locally.Focus on Joburg basics: fix services, finances, and appoint competent leaders..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 at 5:30am 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.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By John Matisonn.Former DA leader Helen Zille’s decision to return to Johannesburg, where she grew up, to try to turn around the most important city in Africa, could change both South Africa’s economy and its politics dramatically.The hurdles, of course, are immense.If she scales the first hurdle of being chosen by the DA as its mayoral candidate, her next hurdle is to persuade enough black and other voters to cross their Rubicon to vote for a white led party after three decades of loyalty to the ANC. She brings both baggage as well as strong appeal. Few dispute that she turned around Cape Town and that it’s the only major South African town that is well run, grows, attracts investment and where property values keep going up.As a South African politician, she is a unique brand. Her detractors point to her tweets that were read as soft-pedalling colonialism and accuse her of favouring whites, which she vehemently denies, but that baggage is likely less relevant in Johannesburg for three reasons. First, most Jo’burgers of all races are desperate for competent local government. Second, the GNU has shown voters that if the DA is in power, they don’t bring back apartheid, neutralising that old propaganda narrative. And third, because its local government, it will be an easier Rubicon for some black voters to cross than giving a white-led party national power.Getting approved as the DA’s candidate for mayor is the first hurdle. She faces a field of DA members with local ties. But she has such star power in the party, as well as unrivalled support, that she is the odds-on favourite. Her next hurdle will be attracting enough votes in the election to significantly improve the DA’s showing of 26.1% in 2021, and emerging as the largest party in the city. This would mean beating the ANC, which came first with 33.6% last time. That would be a significant climb, but not insurmountable in the current political climate.It will depend on a strong campaign, focussed on the extent and longevity of Johannesburg’s failures under ANC dominance by Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi, whose minority provincial government has produced little to boast about. Next she would have to cobble together a coalition with constitutionalist small parties. Small party support is likely in flux, but based on the 2021 showing that would mean repairing differences with Action South Africa leader Herman Mashaba, who was Johannesburg’s DA mayor before falling out with the DA leadership..Read more:.Helen Zille’s high-stakes gamble: Can the DA take Johannesburg? - Nicholas Lorimer.Everything will depend on the final numbers, but at this stage it seems that ActionSA’s 16.05% three years ago makes it a coalition player. The DA’s more obvious allies, including the Inkatha FreedomParty, Patriotic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus and the African Christian Democratic Party, together amount to only five or six percent, and repairing frayed ties with the Patriotic Alliance would add only about another three. Not enough.Her next hurdle is obviously to deliver as mayor. Voted world mayor of the year in 2008 by City Mayors, an international urban affairs think tank, against 820 rivals, Zille has a track record she can point to. She took office in 2006 with 42% support and the ANC as a coalition partner, surviving multiple attempts to derail her. Her legacy is a stable DA majority in the city and in the Western Cape province, where she was premier for ten years. But if she pulls it off, the ripple effect could become a small tide. Turning around Johannesburg would be a big deal – it would affect national business confidence and even JSE shares. She has already tamped down expectations by saying the task needs at least five years, and she will start with basic services that are vital but not sexy – like water, electricity, sanitation and roads.She has noted that Johannesburg has an infrastructure backlog of R200 billion, and an annual budget of R86 billion, and that the city’s workforce had grown by 86% since 2010. She said that she would initially focus on stabilizing Joburg's finances and restoring service delivery, and that appointing the correct people to key roles, would be fundamental to Joburg's improvement. If she gets that right, and markets her successes well, the DA will be ideally placed for the 2029 national elections. If you’ve voted for the DA once and approve the result, voting DA again is a lot easier.

John Matisonn: What a Zille mayor would mean for SA

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