All political lives end in failure: Zille and the DA's Joburg delusion - Robert King

Key topics:DA bets on Zille to revive Joburg and boost 2029 national hopesCoalition math and internal decay make DA’s success unlikelyDA must shift from saving SA to empowering South Africans directly.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..By Robert King* .Helen Zille looks set to be the DA’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg in 2026. The party plainly hopes that by parachuting its matriarch into South Africa’s most beleaguered city, it can conjure a miracle. If Johannesburg - once the beating heart of the country’s economy, now a byword for urban collapse - can be saved, then perhaps the DA might project competence and position itself for national power in 2029. It is a seductive fantasy. Zille’s record is unmatched: the journalist who exposed Steve Biko’s murder when others looked away; the mayor who wrested Cape Town from ANC decay; the premier who entrenched the Western Cape as the only functioning province in South Africa. Few in public life command her stature. But politics is not a fairy tale. Johannesburg is not Cape Town. And in South Africa, the most qualified candidate is often the one most doomed to fail. The DA has always lived on illusions. The Multi-Party Charter (MPC) - initially called the more fitting Moonshot Pact - promised an opposition united, but descended into squabbling, mutual distrust, and parties cannibalising one another’s voters more than the ANC’s. From the start, it was quietly understood that it would fail. It did - underperforming even the most modest polling expectations. The GNU was worse: only the gullible imagined the ANC would abandon patronage and ideology to govern in good faith. The betrayal was inevitable; the DA’s humiliation began the moment it accepted the ANC’s invitation to tea. These were not accidents but certainties. As Arthur Keppel-Jones wrote over seventy years ago, South African politics is defined by “its unreality… an irresponsible optimism about the future of the country which is very generally expressed”. The DA is simply the latest custodian of this national hallucination and Zille in Johannesburg may well be the final act of it. The arithmetic is merciless. The DA peaked in Johannesburg in 2016 with 38.5% under Mmusi Maimane. By 2024, it had collapsed to 25%, while the ANC, EFF, and MK together commanded 57%. To bridge that gulf in two years would require an electoral miracle - the DA doubling its support, or its opponents dissolving into thin air. Neither will happen. A Brenthurst Foundation poll in April placed the DA at 33% and the ANC at 32%, a result some greeted with celebration, and just this past weekend, the DA published internal polling putting itself at 40% in Johannesburg, marginally above its previous peak. Yet the DA has a long history of polling higher between elections - particularly in its own internal surveys - than it performs at the ballot box. Furthermore, it is historically the ANC that tends to gain as election day approaches. Far from heralding victory, these numbers only underline the scale of the problem: even at its very best, the DA is still nowhere near a governing majority. Coalition prospects are no better. Of Johannesburg’s ten largest parties as of the 2024 election, only the IFP still has a somewhat good relationship with the DA. ActionSA is estranged. Gayton McKenzie’s PA - the likely kingmaker - is openly hostile, particularly to Zille herself. To imagine a repeat of 2006, when she stitched together a Cape Town coalition, is absurd. Johannesburg is more fractured, more criminal, more captured. And suppose the DA staggers into office - what then? Tshwane already gave the answer. There, the DA learned what “victory” means: inheriting hollowed-out institutions riddled with ANC cadre deployment and corruption. These are not systems that reform. They sabotage, resist, metastasise. The DA ends up in government, but not in power. Even with Zille’s formidable stamina, the mayoralty’s powers are not unlimited. Without a majority, she risks becoming the public face of failure - blamed for a city that has become ungovernable. There is another possibility. If the DA emerges as the largest party, it may attempt to cut a deal with the ANC. Johannesburg could then serve as a rehearsal for 2029: a GNU with the DA as senior partner and the ANC as junior. Some polls suggest this is possible. But even if the ANC were willing to concede such a role - itself unlikely - how can one deliver reform in coalition with a criminal syndicate? Then there is the question of Zille herself. She is 74. This is not unusual in politics - Trump is 79, Biden departed at 82 - but for the DA it reveals something worse: decay. She is being fielded in one of what is arguably the party’s two most important contests of 2026: Cape Town and Johannesburg. That fact alone is an indictment. As Gareth van Onselen, the party’s former communications head, observed: “After 30 years, in SA’s urban heartland, the ANC’s biggest weakness, the DA’s biggest potential, it cannot produce a new impactful leader”. The DA is not only running out of ideas. It is running out of leaders. The controversial British politician Enoch Powell once remarked: “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and human affairs”. For Zille, it would be a tragedy - though perhaps a fitting one. She has had one of the most remarkable careers in South African history. To end it mired in Johannesburg’s dysfunction would be sad, yes, but also inevitable: a Shakespearean last act to a great political life. And for the DA? If it fails to seize Johannesburg, it will be forced to confront what its endless schemes - the MPC, the GNU, now the Joburg delusion - have always revealed: its inability to rescue South Africa as a whole. The DA’s delusion is to save South Africa; the real task is to save South Africans - not through fantasies of national redemption, but through autonomy: devolved power, federal self-rule, and, if need be, outright secession. For in the end, South Africa will fall - but South Africans still have a future, if they dare to claim it..*Robert King is a student in politics, philosophy, and economics and co-founder of the Referendum Party.

All political lives end in failure: Zille and the DA's Joburg delusion - Robert King

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