DA federal chair Helen Zille recently announced her intention to stand as a mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Africa’s supposed wealthiest metropolis. This move, which implicitly raises questions about her residency and comes as the city grapples with a massive R200 billion infrastructure backlog, reportedly follows the party’s unsuccessful attempts to convince three high-profile candidates, primarily from the business sector, to contest the Johannesburg mayoralty.
Among other provisions of the Municipal Structures Act 117 of 1998 (as amended) is that to be a councillor in a municipality, a person must be ordinarily resident within the city or ward. While individuals are free to apply for positions within the DA, Zille’s move raises two significant issues: the DA’s internal democratic processes and the contrasting attitudes of black and white South Africans regarding what constitutes “South Africa,” an abstract political entity.
South Africa’s history of apartheid created deeply entrenched racial divisions, separate settlements, identities and differential access to resources and power. There was a Big South Africa (a place of residence for the white majority) and ‘south-africas’ or homelands/ townships (where the different black ethnicities resided, mostly under artificially-created homogeneity). While whites roamed freely from Cape Town to Messina, blacks were confined to limited spaces, curtailing their outlook.
In 1998, Thabo Mbeki described South Africa as one country, but two nations: one white and relatively prosperous, with ready access to developed economic, physical, educational and communication infrastructure, and the other black and poor, excluded from the mainstream economy. It is therefore unsurprising that blacks have not yet formed a national outlook about South Africa as a political entity.
Far from healing the historic divide, the post-1994 dispensation has failed to dismantle the structural and psychological foundations of inequality, allowing both privilege and exclusion to reproduce themselves, now masked in democratic form but rooted in deeply unequal material and social conditions. This complex picture can help explain the current attitudes and opposition to Zille’s candidacy. Not undermining the enduring nature of this dual reality, this article argues that everyone has the right to live or contest a political position across South Africa.
Internal DA Politics and Joburg’s Political Mess
For years, Johannesburg has been mired in governance, socio-economic, and political dysfunction. Like many municipalities, it has become the country’s ailing child, producing mayors such as Kabelo Gwamanda and Thapelo Amad, figures emblematic of its decline. The city also bears the notorious label of being South Africa’s dirtiest and most crime-ridden urban centre.
Recently, President Ramaphosa, in predictable fashion, expressed his “shock” at Johannesburg’s deteriorating condition: “I found the city filthy… and it was not cleaned!” An apology followed from the provincial leadership, acknowledging the ongoing crises of water cuts, potholes, broken traffic lights and overall service delivery failure. These problems reflect not just institutional decay but also political volatility.
Johannesburg has become known for its revolving-door leadership, with mayors and coalitions changing frequently. Since the DA’s Mpho Phalatse was ousted in 2023, the ruling ANC-EFF-PA coalition holds a tenuous majority, controlling just over half the council seats. The DA remains outside this fragile coalition. This means Johannesburg’s political landscape after the 2024 elections is as fractured as ever, and Zille’s candidacy must reckon with coalition engineering amid fierce competition and distrust.
The DA is no bystander to the political turmoil afflicting Gauteng’s metros—Johannesburg, Tshwane, and Ekurhuleni. Now, Zille appears determined to intervene as a political saviour. As a former mayor of Cape Town and ex-premier of the Western Cape, she brings experience in public administration and governance, and her political stature could lend the DA much-needed credibility. Yet, her decision prompts uncomfortable questions: are there no capable individuals within Johannesburg’s DA ranks fit for the mayoral candidacy? More critically, can Zille bypass party processes and select whichever position she prefers?
This brings into focus what might be called Zille’s brand of democratic centralism—a mode of leadership in which she sets the rules, norms and boundaries of internal party democracy. Her dominance within the DA recalls a lineage of African strongmen: Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo), Hastings Banda (Malawi) and Paul Biya (Cameroon). Her decision to contest the Jozi mayoralty has gone unchallenged within the party, revealing the profound influence, or perhaps fear, she exerts. DA Gauteng leader Solly Msimanga admitted to the press that the party had not even discussed Zille’s potential candidacy.
Resistance has instead come from outside the DA, most vocally from former DA mayor Herman Mashaba, now leading ActionSA. His party, itself embroiled in coalition struggles in Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, accused Zille of advancing a “campaign against poor black communities,” calling her candidacy a sign of the DA’s “deep-rooted distrust in black leadership.”
Zille, for her part, has focused her campaign narrative on Joburg’s massive R200 billion infrastructure backlog and its underwhelming R86 billion budget. She frames her goal as stabilising the city’s finances and laying the groundwork for long-term reform. Acknowledging the recovery will take over five years, she champions a “whole-of-society” approach that invites skilled residents and civil society to contribute. Central to her vision is appointing capable individuals to strategic roles in the City Council.
Zille’s Contradictions and the Politics of Convenience
Yet Zille’s intention to “rescue” Johannesburg is not without contradiction: her political history is marked by moments of inflammatory rhetoric that betray an ambivalence about the very spaces she now seeks to govern. In 2012, she infamously referred to Eastern Cape pupils attending schools in the Western Cape as “education refugees”.
Instead of reflecting on the dehumanising nature of the term, she sought to redirect the conversation toward the systemic failures of the Eastern Cape’s education system, evading responsibility for the indignity implied. The irony now is profound: a “refugee” from Cape Town’s Big South Africa imagines herself as a legitimate leader of Johannesburg, a city bearing the deepest scars of colonial spatial planning, migrant labour systems and post-apartheid marginality.
Zille’s double-speak has long exposed a selective memory of South African history. In 2017, she tweeted: “For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water.” That she would glorify the gifts of colonialism while simultaneously seeking to administer a city still reeling from its dispossession, displacement and inequality reveals a discord in both principle and practice.
Her Jozi ambitions, therefore, appear contradictory on two levels: ideologically, she downplays colonial brutality while seeking power in a city shaped by it; symbolically, she embodies the free movement and entitlement of Big South Africa, while those in townships (or urban homelands for blacks) still fight for basic services and a political voice.
The Savage–Victim–Saviour (SVS) logic, as proposed by Kenyan academic Makau Mutua, provides a fitting lens here. Zille positions Jozi as the “victim” of corrupt black leadership, the black political class as the “savage” responsible for its decay, and herself, the white technocrat, as the “saviour” with the tools to rescue the city. This moral narrative absolves structural inequality and reproduces the colonial logic of redemption through whiteness. It also displaces the historical causes of Joburg’s collapse—capital flight, spatial apartheid and state neglect—and recentres the colonial benefactor as the solution.
Zille’s candidacy, then, is not merely a personal ambition but is a political performance of innocence, legitimacy, and rescue, rooted in an ideology that still struggles to come to terms with South Africa’s unfinished decolonial project. It aligns with her party’s ideological flirtation with Donald Trump-style politics and its vocal opposition to affirmative measures aimed at redressing apartheid’s legacies, which she dismisses as “reverse racism” against whites.
A persistent double-speak marks Zille’s political style: she cloaks exclusionary logic in the language of reform and routinely demeans not only her black colleagues within the party, but also the dignity of Johannesburg’s mostly black residents. Her campaign risks imposing yet another iteration of Western Cape exceptionalism: one that treats Jozi not as a complex African metropolis, but as a failed project awaiting white technocratic salvation. But Johannesburg deserves leadership grounded in its lived realities, not the recycled paternalism of white liberal fantasies masked as reform.
Homelandism and the Unresolved Legacy of Apartheid
But Zille’s candidacy also unearths deeper political anxieties rooted in race, identity and place. Her bold move to “rescue” Johannesburg contrasts sharply with political responses in black communities—responses shaped by the legacy of ‘homelandism’, nativism and parochial loyalties. The notion of homelandism refers to the political, social and psychological legacy of South Africa’s apartheid-era Bantustan or homeland system. Today, this thinking manifests in politics and social organisation, perpetuated by ongoing rural-urban labour migrations.
When Thoko Didiza was appointed as the Tshwane mayoral candidate, the fallout exposed unresolved tensions. Political scientist Dirk Kotze noted that her appointment, although procedurally defensible, was seen as part of a broader ANC strategy under Zuma to consolidate power in KZN, at the expense of Gauteng. Despite Didiza’s long residency in Tshwane, her KZN roots (and identity) triggered local resistance. Headlines such as “They can’t bring a Zulu to lead us” illustrated how cultural and ethnic identity can override practical qualifications.
This resentment echoed other tensions, like those in Vuwani, where disputes over municipal boundaries revealed deep-seated ethnic and patronage politics. As Kotze explains, “nativism” in places like Atteridgeville was not merely about governance; it reflected underlying notions of identity, belonging and historical legitimacy. Former mayor Kgosientsho Ramokgopa was seen as the ‘son of the soil’, and Didiza as an ‘outsider’. Didiza’s appointment thus became a symbolic affront to entrenched local networks, further complicating an already fragile political environment.
These events were not isolated. Violence around nomination processes had become a regular feature in ANC meetings across places like Hammanskraal and Mamelodi by 2015, driven mainly by attempts to protect ‘local’ political turf. The backlash to Didiza’s candidacy was partly about preserving the political lineage of Ramokgopa and undermining challengers, such as his former deputy, the late Mapiti Matsena. In the end, Didiza’s rejection was a reminder that South Africa cannot accept anyone trying to a Zille.
Two Visions of South Africa
When considered alongside Zille’s Johannesburg campaign, these stories in Tshwane and Vuwani reveal an uncomfortable truth: the fundamental difference between white and black political perceptions of ‘South Africa’. In many black communities, politics is still shaped by the homeland legacy—a tendency to see leadership as rooted in ethnicity, locality and historic familiarity. White political elites, in contrast, often project themselves as operating within a broader, borderless national sphere. Their attitudes reflect the movement of their capital across Southern Africa, transcending borders while black South Africans cry: “Abahambe!”
This disjuncture reflects a deep-seated psychological inheritance from apartheid. While the homelands have disappeared institutionally, their logic persists in how black communities define belonging, legitimacy and leadership. Thirty years into democracy, many black South Africans remain trapped in the confines of the homeland mindset. Conversely, white South Africans like Zille can claim the entire country as a canvas for political action. Big South Africa versus small ‘south-africas’ (homelands) are at play, but going in opposite directions.
This clash between those who still operate within fractured, identity-based political frames and those who move freely across provincial or ethnic boundaries undermines the dream of a unified, post-apartheid South Africa built on shared citizenship. Until these tensions are confronted, governance and leadership will remain entangled in old vibes and unspoken divides, distorting what democracy truly means in the South African context.
Zille’s confidence is bolstered by a small and insignificant intra-racial class differentiation: a rising black middle class, buoyed by urbanisation and digital activism, increasingly transcends parochial identity politics. Meanwhile, she is also aware that rural and township populations remain disproportionately vulnerable to ethnic patronage and nativist networks. This class heterogeneity sheds light on possible divergent reactions to political figures.
Perhaps, Johannesburg learned something from Tshwane’s rejection of Thoko Didiza and is ready to embrace its new ‘saviour’. The question of whether Zille can lead Johannesburg hinges less on ideological persuasion or ‘mindset changes’. Success requires the DA to forge working relations with ANC provincial structures once again, a GNU 2.0. This calculus is not possible at the moment, but all this can change in 2026.
From a non-homelandist perspective, let Zille stand.
Siya yi banga le economy!
