Car repair shop owner Rashied Najam says officials repeatedly ignored his requests to fix a leaking sewage plant near his business. Now Helen Zille, a former mayor of Cape Town, is campaigning for Johannesburg’s top municipal job after visiting his shop and hearing his concerns. “Here comes a lady that's my total opposition, Helen Zille, and she meets me and she shakes my hand and hugs me,” Najam said.
Zille is 75, a white politician nicknamed “gogo,” meaning grandmother, and the Democratic Alliance’s candidate in a high-stakes November race. Her campaign has turned neglected infrastructure into a public exhibit: viral videos show her swimming in potholes and paddling down flooded streets. Johannesburg residents face chronic power cuts and water shortages. Gangs sometimes seize downtown buildings and charge people to stay there.
The cost of city dysfunction
Johannesburg is Africa’s richest city, yet it has had seven mayors in the last five years. The African National Congress leads a coalition in the city, and Zille’s candidacy has put pressure on the party as some residents grow frustrated with years of dysfunction. Najam said her visit changed his plans at the ballot box: for the first time, he expects not to support the ANC, the party of liberation hero Nelson Mandela. “I love them. But they're disappointing,” he said.
Loyiso Masuku, the ANC’s Johannesburg regional chairperson and one of its potential mayoral candidates, acknowledged the service-delivery problems. She blamed the city’s rapid growth and said, “We're going to be proactive in terms of how we deal with our infrastructure challenges.” Residents like Najam, she added, “do deserve better services.” People waiting for basic repairs hear promises from the party already leading the city—and from a candidate asking for the power to run it instead.
Zille said governing Johannesburg would be much harder than governing Cape Town. “Just getting functional budgeting and allocation working, getting rid of corruption, and focusing on the basics is going to be the big challenge of Joburg,” she said in an interview. Her pitch is to repair municipal government’s machinery, including its budgets and allocation. But power cuts, water shortages and sewage problems remain part of daily life.
The ballot and the bargaining
The mayoral contest also tests whether voters in the mostly Black city will cross racial lines, three decades after apartheid ended. Critics accuse the DA of defending white minority interests; the party denies the accusation. Political analyst William Gumede said many South Africans “equate the ANC with their Black identity.” He said the country doesn’t yet have enough voters who have moved from “the apartheid racial identity barrier” to voting based on competition. Still, he added, “Johannesburg could actually be where we cross the barrier.”
Not every voter is ready to leave the ANC. Jacob Seane, 83, a Soweto resident, said he has voted for the party since South Africa’s first multiracial elections in 1994 and would never change. “I think they saw their mistakes and they will fix their mistakes,” he said.
Zille said internal DA polling showed her leading with about 40% of votes. An Ipsos poll in September put the ANC at 31% and the DA at 28%. No party was expected to win outright, so coalition negotiations will likely decide who governs the city. A mayoral vote won’t, by itself, settle who holds municipal power; parties will bargain over the government that follows.
The result could affect national politics ahead of the 2029 elections. The DA has had a Johannesburg mayor twice before, and winning the city back would boost the party. Asked whether she could win support across racial lines, Zille said, “I just hope that when people get into that ballot box ... the tug of the past isn't too strong.” The campaign centers on the ballot, the mayor’s office and coalition negotiations. The article describes no mutual-aid effort or community-run alternative to the city government.