Can Helen Zille tame the 40,000-strong Johannesburg administrative beast?
The DA federal executive chair, who was officially unveiled as the party’s mayoral candidate for the battered City of Gold in Soweto on Saturday, sets a high bar given her track record in turning Cape Town around in 2006.
Her entry into the Johannesburg race has set the ANC and other parties scrambling to anoint rival candidates strong enough to out-campaign the charismatic 74-year-old in the upcoming municipal polls. The city is set to be the centre of campaigning for the local government elections, which must take place between November 2026 and February 2027.
Johannesburg is a coalition hot mess at present, with a number of small parties holding the balance of power, and there is no guarantee that Zille will emerge as mayor after the election even if the DA is the biggest party in council.
It is clear that unstable, narrowly focused coalition politics has accelerated the decline of the already decaying city since 2016. Yet legislation to stabilise coalitions across the country’s metros and municipalities has stalled — there has been no movement on the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill since last year.
The legislation is intended to limit the number of motions of no confidence filed during a term, while a secondary section, introduced by the DA, provides thresholds for small parties to qualify for a seat in the council.
Given the processes that have yet to unfold around the legislation, as it stands it is unlikely that it will be signed into law ahead of the election, meaning being saddled with a messy, unwieldy coalition could be the first obstacle any incoming mayor for the city will have to face, before even stepping into Metropolitan Centre in Braamfontein.
Bloated, largely rotten administrative staff
An even bigger obstacle to genuine reform in the city is its bloated, largely rotten administrative staff, numbering around 40,000 across all entities at last count. Insiders in national government say the civil service in Johannesburg has been deeply corrupted over the years, mainly through transactional coalitions, which include many small political parties that push for the appointment of “their people” to top posts.
Zille touched on this in her inaugural address as the DA candidate on Saturday: “The city administration must be staffed with skilled, ethical and capable professionals. These officials must be appointed for what they know, rather than who they know or are related to.”
The rot in the city has evolved over the years from a corrupt cohort of politicians to a corrupt administration, as illustrated by the auditor-general’s findings. In Tsakani Maluleke’s latest report a table tracks the “status of key controls” internally across metros in SA. The stronger the controls, the more accountable the city and, crucially, its administration.
Abysmal controls
Johannesburg’s controls can only be described as abysmal. It is rated as performing “poorly” in categories such as oversight responsibility, human resource management, policies and procedures, proper record keeping, daily and monthly reporting, in-year and year-end reporting, reviewing and monitoring compliance (to legislation), information technology systems and controls, leadership and financial and performance management.
In other words, it is failing in every aspect of administration that contributes to the effective running of an institution, business or city. For instance, the city is one of three SA metros that have failed to investigate unauthorised, irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditure for a period of three years or more.
The race for control of Johannesburg began with the announcement of Zille’s candidacy on Saturday, but whoever emerges as mayor will face an immense challenge as they step into the bowels of the city’s headquarters to take on the decade-long rot that has set in there.
It won’t be easy and it won’t be pretty. In fact, given what has transpired elsewhere in the country, it could turn out to be downright dangerous.
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