Helen Zille’s first 100 days – if she becomes Joburg mayor

Johannesburg mayoral candidate and former Cape Town mayor Helen Zille will spend her first 100 days bringing stability to the city’s finances. That’s the first order of business.

After that, she aims to stabilise basic services such as water, electricity and – yes – potholes. There’s no quick fix for a city that is circling the drain and is effectively bankrupt, with just short of R4 billion in cash and R25.2 billion in creditors.

Read:
Eskom warns of power cuts to ‘defaulting’ City of Johannesburg
Jozi, my broken home

Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has set up a special task team within Treasury to bring some order to Joburg’s finances.

“The first thing I would do would be to contact Minister Godongwana to say could you please send your task team,” said Zille, speaking at a presentation at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs) in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

Turning to national support structures

The next port of call will be the Presidential Task Team, which has moved on from addressing crises at Transnet and Eskom to focusing its attention on Joburg.

The Auditor-General will then be asked to help identify where the bodies are buried and to help get a grip on the city’s finances.

Joburg’s slide into slumland is a product of endemic corruption, comprising “an interlocking network of competing corruption syndicates”. This has infiltrated appointments, procurement and virtually all systems across the city administration.

Read: Treasury threatens to cut City of Joburg funding

Getting rid of it will take some backbone and a willingness to confront a frighteningly expansive nest of graft.

That’s not to say there aren’t honest, capable people working in the city administration, as many of them have come forward to explain to Zille and her team how corruption works.

ADVERTISEMENT

CONTINUE READING BELOW

Some of the schemes are ingenious, she says.

She was stunned to learn that the city’s administrative systems are still not digitised, which is “by design”, allowing changes to be introduced into the billing systems so that debts are written off or deleted, or zeros added to invoices, without any ability to trace who made the changes.

Read/listen:

Is Dada Morero about to be Joburg’s worst-ever mayor?

That would come to an end should she be elected mayor, Zille says. She would be flanked by an army of forensic auditors and investigators, with the public being encouraged via an anonymous app to report corruption.

Stabilising the city’s finances is essential to all else that follows.

“Leave will be cancelled in December if the DA wins, as staff will be required to work around the clock to draft an adjustment budget focusing on priority spending.

“The ANC was allowed to run Joburg into the ground, and that’s because of the choices voters made,” she said. In 2006, Cape Town voters decided it was time for change and voted the ANC out. That was the start of the Mother City’s revival.

Service delivery under pressure

Joburg’s fiscal death rattle was accentuated by France’s Agence Française de Développement’s (AFD’s) refusal of Joburg’s request for additional financing in April, claiming the city failed to meet the terms and conditions of a previous R2.5 billion facility granted in early 2024.

This comes at a time when the city faces a wage bill of around R21 billion for the 2025/26 financial year, equal to about 25% of its annual operating budget of R84 billion.

Part of Joburg’s problem stretches back 30 years, when several smaller municipalities were amalgamated into one, resulting in many staff being short-changed for the work they were doing.

The same happened in Cape Town, but that was quickly resolved when the DA took over.

On her leadership style – seen by some as confrontational – Zille says she has more than one style: sometimes coaxing is needed, sometimes conciliation, and sometimes confrontation.

ADVERTISEMENT:

CONTINUE READING BELOW

“I hate to play this card, but when a woman is strong and sometimes confrontational, people have a million things to say, that they wouldn’t [say] if it was a man.

“Sometimes when you have to make things happen and prevent things falling off a cliff, you need to have a backbone of steel, and that I think I do have.”

As for the DA’s chances of winning Johannesburg, Zille says the party conducts daily polling, and its statisticians reckon the city is there for the taking if it can secure 490 000 individual votes out of a city of six million.

That would give it an outright majority of at least 136 seats in a council of 270.

“There are definitely 490 000 DA supporters in Joburg. Our strategy is to get them to go out and vote. Our biggest problem comes from established DA wards where people don’t go out and vote. It’s a matter of life or death for Joburg,” says Zille.

Coalition politics

Without a majority, the DA would be forced into potentially uncomfortable coalitions with smaller parties, but it dismisses any tie-up with ideologically divergent parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

This, she says, is what sank the mayoralty of former DA mayor Herman Mashaba, who had to juggle an uneasy alliance with the EFF and other small parties.

Listen/read: Mashaba hints at mayoral run, refuses to back Zille

He ended up being called the “EFF mayor of Joburg” because of the concessions he was forced to make to keep the coalition alive. He eventually abandoned the DA – ahead of a no confidence vote in Joburg – to form ActionSA.

Zille and the DA are pushing for proportional representation voting with minimum thresholds to prevent smaller parties from having outsized influence in governance.

In Germany, a party must win at least 5% of the popular vote before it wins a single seat. Other countries have similar thresholds.

ADVERTISEMENT:

CONTINUE READING BELOW

SA has none, allowing tiny parties like Al Jama-ah, with just 0.2% of the national vote, to end up in influential positions, including at one point the mayoralty of Johannesburg. 

Coalition negotiations are chiefly about who gets what, rather than what’s best for the city.

Asked whether the DA is perceived as too pro-rich to attract mass support, Zille said the experience in Cape Town contradicts this view, where the city has a budget of R40 billion over three years, of which 75% is spent in the poorest areas on new infrastructure.

Joburg vs DA-led municipalities

She points to the DA’s record of governance in Cape Town and the Western Cape, which far outstrips metros elsewhere in the country on most metrics: unemployment is 19.6% in the Western Cape versus a national average of 33%.

Cape Town hosted 11 million tourists over the last year, while the comparable figure for Gauteng was about three million.

Every seven tourists results in one permanent job, which accounts in part for the low unemployment in the Western Cape. These jobs are a crucial foot on the ladder out of poverty.

The bus rapid transit system is being canned in all cities except Cape Town, which has also built more houses than Joburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni combined. All this, says Zille, is evidence of what can be done with honest government.

Read:
Cape Town crowned 2025’s Best City in the World
SA’s hosting of G20 to boost international tourist numbers
Cape Town airport breaks all records with 11.1m passengers in 2025

Why did she choose to run for mayor at the age of 75 when retirement beckoned?

“Joburg’s got to work for the rest of the country to work. I have turned around two spheres of government where we took the ANC out of power. One was the City of Cape Town, the other was the province of Western Cape,” she said.

The next port of call, if Zille succeeds, is Joburg.

#Helen #Zilles #days #Joburg #mayor