By Nco Dube | 27 September 2025

Zille’s Polarising Brand

Helen Zille’s declaration as the DA’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg in the 2026 Local Government Elections (LGE 2026) has done more than rattle political insiders. It has exposed a yawning deficit in our public discourse: the scarcity of genuine competence. Zille, much like Jacob Zuma,  is a figure who evokes equal parts admiration and outrage. Her nostalgic reflections on colonialism are more than ill-judged. They reveal an ideological blindness to the deep trauma of South Africa’s past.

Her flirtation with white-supremacist tropes and suggestions to “deport” Eastern Cape migrants betrayed a callous disregard for human dignity. She has been accused of minimising colonial violence, sympathising with Zionist policies that enable the indiscriminate killing and dispossession of Palestinians, and white racial undertones. These flaws matter, and they should disqualify any leader intent on uniting a deeply fractured city. These controversies are not mere footnotes; they are fundamental stains on the record of a would-be mayor.

And yet, it is precisely this complex persona that makes Zille so unnerving. She has mastered the optics of efficiency. Whether trimming bureaucracy or urban sprucing, she conveys an image of decisive action. Under her premiership in the Western Cape and her tenure as Cape Town mayor, affluent suburbs benefited from sustained investment in roads, refuse removal and safety initiatives. 

Her track record seems to promise shine and order where there is currently squalor and chaos. But the very mechanisms she employs for the suburbs are withheld from those on the periphery: the townships and informal settlements where the vast majority of Johannesburg’s residents live.

Efficiency by Invitation Only

The DA’s governance model often resembles a gated community: pristine roads and reliable public facilities inside the perimeter, decay and neglect outside it. Midvaal in Gauteng is the DA’s poster child, boasting eleven consecutive clean audits and near-perfect municipal performance reports. But Midvaal is a small, well-resourced municipality with a limited geographic footprint and a high property tax base. Its success is real, but it is also a highly specific phenomenon that cannot be simply upscaled to Greater Johannesburg, a metropolis of more than six million residents and vast inequalities.

In Cape Town, the contrast between wealthy suburbs and marginalised areas has become a textbook example of selective service delivery. While Claremont enjoys regular refuse collection, Dunoon residents scramble for wheelie bins. Whereas Camps Bay’s seawall is reinforced ahead of each storm season, the residents of Blikkiesdorp pray their corrugated-iron shacks do not flood. The DA’s pristine audits fail to capture the lived reality of communities who wait months for water tankers or endure weeks without electricity repairs. Under this model, efficiency is wielded as a tool to entrench privilege rather than uplift the most vulnerable.

Alexandra in Johannesburg is a living testament to how selective governance leaves the poorest behind. Families live hand-to-mouth in shacks long after promises of dignified housing have evaporated. Streets are clogged with uncollected refuse, rodents flourish and waste-fired stench becomes the soundtrack of daily life. In Diepsloot, irregular water supply and pothole-ridden roads persist despite repeated budget allocations. These challenges are not technical puzzles awaiting brilliant solutions; they are political choices, reflecting whose needs are prioritised and whose are ignored.

ANC’s Indiscriminate Failure

If the DA’s neglect is surgical, the ANC’s failures are indiscriminate. Under ANC leadership, service delivery in Johannesburg has collapsed across wards, both affluent and impoverished. Corruption scandals such as the R4 billion allegedly misappropriated at Johannesburg Water and the multi-million-rand City Power debacles have eroded public trust. Roads buckle under potholes, streetlights remain dark, and burst pipes flood council properties and taxi ranks alike. Clean audit outcomes in some ANC-run municipalities feel like hollow victories when taps run dry and refuse piles up.

Factional battles within the ANC have paralysed decision-making at municipal level. Leadership contests divert attention from pothole repairs to politicking. Council meetings dissolve into point-scoring rather than action-lists. Meanwhile, everyday South Africans endure power outages, water interruptions and crime waves. The party that once branded itself as the custodian of the oppressed now governs with the inattentiveness of a distracted caretaker.

President Cyril Ramaphosa recently acknowledged that DA-run municipalities outperform many ANC-led metros in audit outcomes and basic service delivery indicators. Yet that tribute is backhanded at best. It highlights the ANC’s inability to govern without internal sabotage and blatant graft. Overwhelmed by patronage networks, the party has abandoned its founding mission of redressing inequality and instead replicates the very concentration of wealth it once opposed.

The Competence Conundrum

Helen Zille’s candidacy reframes the upcoming election as a referendum on competence. It is no longer enough to promise change; voters demand proof of delivery. In a city where daily life is disrupted by bursting sewer lines and uncollected litter, slogans ring hollow without visible results. Zille has styled herself as the antidote to inertia. Her campaign is built around images of freshly painted street poles, unclogged stormwater drains and well-lit pavements. Even if these images are aspirational, they resonate more powerfully than the ANC’s fractured narratives of struggle nostalgia or boilerplate anti-corruption talk.

But competency cannot remain a marketing slogan. South Africans know that even well-intentioned leaders can fail without institutional support and ethical administration. The DA’s record demonstrates that competence for some cannot substitute for competence for all. And the ANC’s record shows that competence without integrity collapses under its own contradictions.

The true test of competence lies in delivering basic services impartially across the entire city, whether in Sandton’s financial district or Ivory Park’s residential streets. It demands transparent procurement, effective project management, disciplined maintenance regimes and a culture of accountability. Competence also requires empathy. The ability to listen to community concerns and adapt solutions to local contexts rather than applying one-size-fits-all policies.

Reimagining Johannesburg Leadership

This election demands a new kind of candidate, one unshackled by a singular party’s history of selective efficiency or universally errant governance. The ideal leader would combine the DA’s operational focus with the ANC’s rhetorical commitment to inclusivity, minus the cronyism. They would bring technocratic rigour to project planning, close lingering gaps in electricity and water supply, and rebuild failing stormwater infrastructure. At the same time, they would maintain a relentless community outreach programme that engages township leaders, informal traders, taxi associations and youth organisations.

Such a candidate might emerge from beyond the two traditional power blocs. Imagine a coalition that pairs a respected ANC-aligned urban planner with a DA-affiliated logistics expert. Or an independent mayoral hopeful, backed by civil society and business chambers, who has overseen successful urban renewal projects in Alexandra or Khayelitsha. The campaign would pledge measurable targets: an audit of all potholes and a published repair schedule; a quarterly report on waste-collection turnaround times by ward; a public portal tracking housing-project milestones.

This is not a utopian vision. Some municipalities like eThekwini (although itself hardly a paragon of efficiency and service delivery!) have experimented with online dashboards to track service-delivery metrics in real time. Tshwane rolled out a system for residents to log pothole repairs via WhatsApp and receive confirmation of completion. These initiatives show that technology and collaboration can narrow the gap between municipal promises and citizen experiences. Johannesburg, with its massive budget, could pioneer similar solutions. If only its leadership had the will.

Breaking the Party-State Duopoly

The dominance of the ANC and DA has long stifled political innovation in local government. Candidates are recycled from one election to the next, internal party fatigue sets in and voters default to tribal or racial loyalties or headline-grabbing populism. The result is a chronic leadership vacuum at the municipal level. When real estate magnates and technology entrepreneurs express frustration with their municipal bills and safety concerns, the public assumes they are whining of privilege. Yet their discontent underscores the universality of certain challenges.

However, the emergence of dynamic smaller parties such as ActionSA, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), Rise Mzansi, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the uMkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP) offers a credible challenge to the ANC/DA duopoly. These parties bring fresh energy and diverse leadership, often rooted in grassroots activism and community engagement. Their platforms may move beyond tired ideological battles, focusing instead on practical solutions to local issues like service delivery, crime, and economic opportunity. By highlighting the lived realities of Johannesburg’s residents, they start to break the mould of traditional party politics.

To overcome the old duopoly, civil society organisations and business forums must step forward as kingmakers, but they must now also recognise the potential of these rising parties. By supporting a shift from party manifestos to concrete deliverables, these initiatives help smaller parties translate ambition into tangible change and offer voters a genuine alternative to the entrenched ANC/DA dominance.

The Road Ahead

This election is not about Helen Zille’s personal virtues or vices. It is about whether any formation can credibly promise and perform for every household in Johannesburg. If the DA cannot shed its reputation for selective efficiency, it will remain a vehicle for suburbia rather than a champion for the mass of the city. If the ANC cannot escape its culture of factionalism and corrupt entitlement, it will continue to stumble from one apology to the next, leaving collapsed roads and fetid stormwater canals as its legacy.

A failure to rise to this moment will cement a choice between selective efficiency and universal failure. Zille’s campaign has throttled open the door to a broader debate on what genuine municipal competence looks like. Now it is up to voters, civic organisations and business leaders to demand accountability across every ward. They must insist that complexity is not a pretext for paralysis and that inequality is not a side effect of progress but its central test.

Johannesburg deserves better than political recycling. It deserves leadership that knows the names of its worst-served streets, not just the suburbs favoured by advertisers. It deserves governance that recognises every dollar in its budget is owed to taxpayers from Alexandra, Ivory Park and Diepsloot as much as to Sandton, Rosebank and Hyde Park.

If no party can meet that standard, then the city should look beyond party affiliations for its next mayor. It should explore coalition arrangements or an independent candidate with a proven record in township upliftment. Only then can competence move from campaign currency to lived reality, transforming Johannesburg from a tale of two cities into a single metropolis where every resident has the right to clean water, reliable power and a dignified home.

(Dube is a noted Political Economist, Businessperson, and Social Commentator whose insights are regularly featured on Ukhozi FM and in various newspapers. For further reading and perspectives, visit: http://www.ncodube.blog)