Seven mayors in five years: that’s Johannesburg’s record heading into its November mayoral race, and it’s the backdrop for Helen Zille’s bid to run Africa’s richest city. Zille, 75, is nicknamed “gogo,” meaning grandmother. She previously served as mayor of Cape Town and head of the Western Cape province. Analysts say her campaign could reshape South African politics.
Her promise is simple: to “fix” Johannesburg. Viral videos show her swimming in potholes and paddling down flooded streets. Residents who’ve waited years for basic services are listening.
A City That Doesn’t Work
Johannesburg is Africa’s richest city, yet chronic power cuts and water shortages persist. Gangs sometimes seize downtown buildings and charge people to stay there. The African National Congress (ANC) leads a city coalition, and Zille’s candidacy has put it under pressure.
Rashied Najam owns a car repair shop. He says officials repeatedly ignored his requests to fix a leaking sewage plant near his business. Then Zille showed up. “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. She later held a campaign event at his shop. For the first time, he doesn’t plan to back 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, blaming the city’s rapid growth. “We’re going to be proactive in terms of how we deal with our infrastructure challenges,” she said. She added that residents like Najam “do deserve better services.”
Zille isn’t promising miracles. She said Johannesburg would be much harder to govern than 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.
The Polls and the Politics
The race is close. Zille said internal polling by her pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) 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 is expected to win outright, so coalition negotiations will likely determine who runs the city government.
The DA has held the Johannesburg mayoralty twice before. Winning would give the party control of South Africa’s economic hub and could affect national politics ahead of the 2029 elections.
The race also tests whether voters in the mostly Black city will cross racial lines three decades after apartheid ended. Critics often accuse the DA of defending white minority interests, a claim the party denies. Political analyst William Gumede said many South Africans “equate the ANC with their Black identity.” He said: “We don’t yet have enough people who have moved from a voting point of view from the apartheid racial identity barrier... to a new era where they vote based on competition.” He added: “But Johannesburg could actually be where we cross the barrier.”
Loyalty still runs deep. Jacob Seane, 83, a Soweto resident, said he has voted for the ANC 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 recognized the pull of history. “I just hope that when people get into that ballot box ... the tug of the past isn’t too strong,” she said.
Why This Matters:
Johannesburg is South Africa’s economic hub, and its failures are concrete: power cuts, water shortages, leaking sewage, and buildings seized by gangs. Najam says officials ignored him until a rival candidate arrived, an example of what dysfunction costs the people who keep a city’s economy running. The vote tests whether residents will hold a governing party accountable for results. Seane’s loyalty shows how strong political identity remains. No party is expected to win outright, so coalition deals after the vote may matter as much as the vote itself. The outcome will also shape the DA’s and ANC’s positions heading into the 2029 national elections, about three years away.