South Africa’s Iron Lady who wants to fix Johannesburg

Having served at the helm of the Western Cape and Cape Town’s governance structures, DA federal council chairperson Helen Zille is now considering taking on the challenge of Executive Mayor of Johannesburg.

While she has noted that this would be no small task, Zille has extensive experience working in the political sphere, having been active in party politics for three decades.

Zille was born in Hillbrow in Johannesburg to parents who had both independently fled to South Africa to avoid Nazi persecution during World War II.

She studied a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Witwatersrand and joined the Progressive Party’s youth movement, the Young Progressives, while at the institution.

Her mother was also politically active at the time, working as a volunteer for the Black Sash Advice Office.

Zille’s first job saw her work as a journalist covering politics for the Rand Daily Mail, where she led an investigation into the murder of the Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko.

While the apartheid government claimed Biko died of natural causes after a hunger strike, Zille’s team reported evidence that he had suffered severe head trauma and had likely been beaten while in police custody.

The story was titled “No sign of hunger strike — Biko doctors” and saw the then Minister of Justice and Police threaten to ban the newspaper.

Her entrance into politics came about when she served as a technical advisor to the Democratic Party (DP) during the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa).

Following South Africa’s transition into democracy in 1994, Zille became an active member of the DP the following year and was elected to the Western Cape Provincial Legislature in 1999.

She was also appointed as the Member of the Executive (MEC) for Education.

In 2000, the DP merged with the New National Alliance and the Federal Alliance to form the Democratic Alliance.

Zille was eventually named the DA’s national spokesperson and a member of parliament (MP) in the National Assembly for the party in 2004. However, Zille left Parliament in 2006 when she was elected as the mayor of Cape Town.

The following year, she took over leadership of the DA from Tony Leon, who announced he would not run for re-election.

A year later, Zille was presented with the World Mayor Award by the international City Mayors Foundation after only two years at the helm of Cape Town’s government.

The DA went on to win the Western Cape with an outright majority during the national and Provincial elections in 2009, which saw Zille become premier of the province.

Her party leadership spanned until 2015 when she announced she would not be running for re-election and was replaced by Mmusi Maimane.

After facing backlash from the DA following controversial Twitter posts in 2017 that alluded to colonialism as having some benefits, Zille stepped down from the party’s decision-making structures.

She then stepped down from Premier of the Western Cape in 2019 after her second term and was elected chairperson of the DA’s federal council later that year following the party’s slight electoral decline, a position she has held since.

‘We need to fix Johannesburg if we want South Africa to work’

Zille has been making headlines recently following her announcement that she is considering contesting for the position of Mayor of Johannesburg in an effort to fix the city.

“The reason I want to contend for the position of mayor is because Johannesburg is very broken and we need to fix Johannesburg if we want South Africa to work,” Zille told the SABC.

While seriously considering the position, she has made the point that she will first need to compete with the rest of the DA’s candidates who would also like to run for Joburg’s top spot.

The former Western Cape Premier said that she was first approached about a year ago by someone who asked whether she was up for the task, with her first response being “are you absolutely ridiculous.”

While Zille has since changed her tune, she said that the position of Executive Mayor of Johannesburg, given the work required to fix the city and the remuneration received.

However, she argues that this is unimportant to her as she is focused on fixing the country for the benefit of her grandchildren, which begins with fixing the City of Gold.

Zille said that if elected, she would first build a cohesive team to manage whatever coalition is present and then prioritise the city’s finances.

Speaking to BizNews at the beginning of June, she said that Johannesburg has a capital infrastructure backlog of R200 billion while its entire budget is R86 billion.

“I have some idea about how I would start to address that, but the bottom line is that it would take more than five years, and what I can do is stop the rot and start to turn the ship around,” she said.

“If Joburg is to be fixed, it will take a whole-of-society approach, which certainly is the DA’s commitment, but it’s all hands on deck. I see civil society, provincial government, and national government all as critical partners.”

Speaking on the DA’s time governing the City of Tshwane and criticism that many did not see the “DA experience,” Zille told EWN that it is very difficult to fix a broken city.

The DA held the Executive Mayor position in Tshwane between 2016 and 2024, apart from a few months between Randall Willims and Cilliers Brink’s terms, when the ANC held the position.

“If it takes 30 years to break a city, it won’t take six months to fix it. People have noticed the difference in Cape Town because the DA has been in power for 20 years,” she said.

“If you take a little step forward every day for 20 years, it’s going to make a massive difference. However, if you take a little step backwards every day for three decades, it will look like Joburg.”