Helen Zille says 490,000 registered DA voters need to turn out and vote for her party — on both ballots — in the upcoming local government elections.
“If they do that, we win an outright majority,” said Zille, who is running to become the next mayor of Johannesburg, South Africa’s troubled economic and financial hub, home to about 6-million people.
The 2021 local government elections registered a 48% voter turnout.
Zille, who is the DA federal council chair, equivalent to the ANC’s secretary-general, said it would take her administration about five years to turn around a city plagued by water and electricity woes, maladministration, financial mismanagement, entrenched corruption, illegal immigration, violent crime and general lawlessness and governance failures.
Water challenges in Joburg have resulted in certain areas going without water for months on end, prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to establish a National Water Crisis Committee, which he will chair, to address the severe water supply issues in Joburg and other parts of the country.
In his budget speech last week, finance minister Enoch Godongwana said Johannesburg Water’s revenue was R11.9bn “but only R1.3bn is allocated to Joburg Water for capital expenditure.
This has contributed to the massive backlog of R64bn that is needed to fix water supply problems in the city”.
“If this practice of collecting revenue from basic services while diverting the funds to unrelated functions continues, maintenance backlogs will grow, services deteriorate and critical infrastructure systems eventually collapse,” Godongwana said.
“To correct the trajectory, R27.7bn has been allocated over the medium term to a performance-linked reform for metro trading services in electricity, water, sanitation and solid waste.”
In an exclusive interview with Business Day, Zille said: “My vision for Joburg is an inclusive city for all, in which reliable services are delivered by an excellent government that cares for all the people.” Zille, who was born in Hillbrow and raised in the city, is the erstwhile premier of the Western Cape and former mayor of Cape Town, regarded as one of the best run municipalities in the country.
My vision for Joburg is an inclusive city for all, in which reliable services are delivered by an excellent government that cares for all the people
— Helen Zille
She said Selby had been without water for eight months, adding the water crisis had been a long time coming and was a combination of “deliberate” and “neglect”.
“Joburg has bought a new fleet of water tankers, instead of attending to the crumbling infrastructure. That shows you their priorities. It’s a combination of deliberate [action] and neglect. That’s why the finance minister singled out Joburg in his budget speech to show you how bad it is,” she said, adding the Cape Town metro replaced hundreds of kilometres of water pipes every year while Joburg only replaced 17km of piping.
Joburg reservoirs were on their last legs, said Zille, singling out Hursthill, South Hills, Alexandra/Beria, and Midrand as requiring much-needed maintenance.
“Factories have had to close, people are losing jobs, it’s a terrible situation ... water tankers in Joburg are going to be with us for a very long time,” she said.
On electricity, Zille said people needed to be less reliant on Eskom, which she said was in a “death spiral”.
People needed to generate their own electricity and sell the surplus back to local councils. “That’s what is happening in Cape Town, people are becoming less reliant on Eskom. I do think Eskom is in a death spiral. It has been enormously helped by IPPs [independent power producers] pumping power into the grid. Look, there’s a role for Eskom but there is no need to monopolise generation and distribution,” she said. Eskom is being unbundled into three units responsible for generation, transmission, and distribution.
When we took over Cape Town [from the ANC] it was deteriorating. We turned it around. When we take Joburg over we are going to address the issue of syndicated corruption
— Helen Zille
“When we took over Cape Town [from the ANC] it was deteriorating. We turned it around. When we take Joburg over we are going to address the issue of syndicated corruption ... we will ringfence money that comes in from trading services to maintain infrastructure and fix what’s broken and invest for the future.”
Zille has trained her guns on corruption, saying fighting it would require guts and grit. She would institute a forensic audit on all the city’s major contracts, and stressed the procurement system was “terribly rigged at the moment”. Zille would open up the bid evaluation committee to “public scrutiny”.
“We will set up a very modern system for reporting corruption on an app” that would make whistleblowers untraceable. She admitted there was risk to standing up against corruption and that it would be difficult to root it out, but she was determined to prevent South Africa from becoming a mafia state.
Regarding the upcoming municipal elections, Zille, the 2008 World Mayor Award winner said Joburg residents must give them enough votes, promising that in five years’ time Joburg would have a reliable water and electricity supply, proper roads network, safer public places and that investment would flow back into the metro. “It’s sad to see what’s happened to Joburg, but we can work together to fix the city.”
She was concerned about voter turnout during the election because “this election is going to be the turnout election. Voter turnout is going to be make or break in this election. I don’t want to hear about corruption or any complaints if people don’t come out to vote”.
The only two parties that could be the biggest are the DA and ANC and it mattered who was the biggest as that party would get to pick a mayor.
“We want to win outright, or be the biggest party by a considerable margin. People must make up their minds in this election ... every single vote counts. People must get off their backsides and vote,” Zille said.
“We need 490,000 registered DA voters to go vote DA, if they do that we win an outright majority.”
Correction: March 2 2026
This story’s headline and first paragraph have been amended.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.