Zille's bid for mayor of Joburg must go beyond branding

The 2026 local elections are about delivering real change to marginalised households

- NCO DUBE

HELEN Zille in Soweto, where she was announced as the DA's Joburg mayoral candidate for the 2026 local government elections.

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HELEN Zille’s declaration as the DAs 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-suprem-acist 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.