The move to draft Helen Zille as the next Joburg mayor is arguably the most exciting thing to happen in SA politics in a long time.
Currently chair of the DA’s federal executive and federal council, she was a brilliant mayor of Cape Town between 2006 and 2009, setting it up to be the success it is today.
Local elections will be held late next year or in early 2027. If she were to enter the race as the DA candidate Zille would walk it, and possibly be able to run the metro with the DA alone. Joburg is a ruin, and Zille is as tough as nails. They were made for each other.
Two big things happen if she runs. First, her mere appearance on the DA ticket would do the cause of direct elections in local government generally the world of good. In practice the vote would be held on the same proportional representation basis that has ruined the country over the past 30 years.
But a Zille appearance would instantly change the look and feel of the election in the city — it would be about her and what she could do. I don’t know of a politician better organised, more driven and less vulnerable than she is.
She would become personally accountable and would have to prepare voters for the inevitable pain of repair after her victory. But she could in the process do the cause of a more representative democracy no end of good. It is the lack of accountability, not poor skills, that has ruined small-town SA. Only direct elections will ever fix it.
Zille is about 74 years old and lives modestly in Cape Town, close to family. She’s healthy, but two terms fixing Joburg would get her to 84. Even for her that would be enough. She has more than done her duty by this country.
The second big consequence of her deciding now to be available for Joburg is that it would trigger a process of renewal, now urgent, in the DA leadership itself. There is an elective federal congress due around May next year, but there’s no reason it can’t be done next month.
If there is to be new leadership to replace Zille and party leader John Steenhuisen ahead of the local elections it would need more than the few months a May ’26 congress would give it to run a winning campaign.
The question of whether Steenhuisen wants to contend again needs answering soon, both by him and senior colleagues. He has quickly mastered his brief as agriculture minister in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s coalition cabinet, but is not giving even close colleagues any sign he may want out of the party leadership. To do so would invite instant jockeying.
The question of whether Steenhuisen wants to contend again needs answering soon, both by him and senior colleagues.
Steenhuisen has a young family and not unreasonably needs the job and, in his case, the ministerial pension at the end of it. Nothing happens, then, until someone opens him up to the possibility that he could remain in the cabinet even if he is no longer DA leader.
If his colleagues simply leave him in charge they risk losing the most juicy political opportunity of the age — that the DA in both the forthcoming local and national elections could take larger shares of the vote than the ANC itself. Or at the very least it could come close.
But to do that leadership matters. For all their positive qualities neither Steenhuisen nor Zille have much to write home about after recent elections. In the local polls in 2021 the DA faltered badly, winning just 21.66% of the vote against 26.9% in 2016.
In last year’s general election the Steenhuisen/Zille DA scraped together just 21.81% of the vote, a meagre 115,000 up from the 20.77% considered so disastrous that they fired Mmusi Maimane for it.
The DA can do better.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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