A year ago, former DA leader John Steenhuisen announced Helen Zille as the party’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, promising to make the city work. Following twelve months of high-profile campaigning and political theatre, it is time to examine the candidate, the manifesto, the party, and their governance record. It is time for a rigorous examination of her governing record and that of the Democratic Alliance across Cape Town and other municipalities where the party has exercised executive authority.
Public discourse has often focused on Helen Zille’s controversial remarks, such as calling Eastern Cape migrants “refugees” in the Western Cape and her 2017 tweet claiming colonialism had positive aspects.
Supporters and defenders dismiss these remarks as poor choice of words rather than her true beliefs. They argue that the focus should instead be on her and the Democratic Alliance’s overall governing record and philosophy.
Since the 2016 local government elections, coalition governments have become an increasingly prominent feature of South African local government. Although the Democratic Alliance (DA) led coalitions in the three major Gauteng metros during this period, the party currently appears reluctant to campaign on that record.
This stems from their bleak record of ineptitude. The DA had two significant opportunities to lead Johannesburg through coalition government, and those experiences provide an important test of its ability to govern in a fragmented political environment.
This period contributed to Johannesburg’s decline because the city suffered from chronic instability, driven by coalition breakdowns, declining service delivery, irregular expenditure, and weak financial controls.
They have tried to explain away this ineffectiveness by blaming their junior coalition partners. However, in today’s era of coalition politics, a leader’s or party’s inability to manage partnerships because of their own stubbornness, ideological puritanism, and arrogance is a fatal and disqualifying flaw.
All this undermines the idea that the upcoming local government elections are simply a referendum on ANC governance.
Cape Town, often promoted as the DA’s flagship municipality, offers a clear view of the party’s governing model. Under its leadership, the city has increasingly deepened apartheid-era spatial divides. While its economy focuses primarily on tourism and the needs of wealthy residents, poor and middle-class communities continue to be pushed to the margins.
While advocates of this pro-business model claim this approach is about boosting revenue to save the city’s budget, this model is failing because lower-income residents are being left behind.
The Constitutional Court’s July 2026 Tafelberg judgment brought Cape Town’s housing inequalities into sharp focus. The Court found that the city and the Western Cape Government had failed to meet their constitutional obligations to deliver affordable housing in the CBD and Sea Point. It also made clear that where people live matters, particularly in a city still shaped by apartheid’s spatial legacy.
Although the Western Cape Government, not the city, decided to sell the Tafelberg property, the judgment raises questions about both governments’ housing records. Cape Town’s challenge is not just to grow its economy, but to ensure that people who cannot afford to live in its most accessible areas are not shut out of economic opportunity.
Instead of using valuable land in places like Sea Point for affordable housing, the city sold it for profit. This means the municipality has not done its constitutional duty to fix the deep geographic inequalities left by apartheid, inequalities that still divide communities by race and class.
The DA-run city government, which began under Helen Zille, has actively pushed a process that forces poorer people out of the city. Their policy has interacted with market forces in ways that have failed to sufficiently protect poorer residents from displacement. Cape Town has been turned into a popular place for international tourists and a retirement destination for well-off foreigners.
This policy of deliberately catering to digital nomads and overseas visitors, who are willing to pay R25,000 to R30,000 a month for a one-bedroom flat, has driven rental and living costs far higher than most South Africans can afford.
A 2026 Al Jazeera investigation reports that property prices in some Cape Town areas increased by more than 200% over the previous decade and municipal rates and charges by nearly 500%, while describing displacement pressures in Bo-Kaap. As a result, families who have lived there for generations are being forced to leave.
Given that approximately 76% of Cape Town’s residents earn below R22,000 per month, most are unable to afford the cost of living in central areas.
The DA’s latest local government manifesto continues this trajectory by proposing to transfer even more functions to private service providers, treating outsourcing, agencification, and privatisation as solutions, despite past rounds having weakened, rather than strengthened, state capacity.
This is surprising because the DA spent over a decade strongly opposing the Gauteng e-toll system and supporting public boycotts. When Johannesburg and Gauteng residents rejected e-tolls, they rejected the idea that essential public services should prioritise private profit.
Essentially, the DA is offering the people of Johannesburg the same approach they previously rejected: treating residents like clients and public services like commodities.
While well-regulated public-private partnerships can help in mobilising funding, handing over public service delivery entirely to the private sector is an ideological addiction rather than pragmatism. Privatisation fundamentally alters core incentives, placing shareholder returns above public welfare. When municipalities outsource utilities, low-income households bear the brunt of rising tariffs and strict disconnections.
Free-market mechanisms do not hold all the answers. The state must still intervene on behalf of vulnerable communities, not as a temporary emergency measure, but as a permanent function of a democratic government.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has hypocritically criticised water problems in Johannesburg, given that Cape Town still has its own unresolved water issues and major delays in its post-drought water plan.
After the near-miss water crisis between 2015 and 2018, Cape Town promised a New Water Programme, but many of those important projects are now running nearly a decade behind schedule. The city’s latest reports show that these delays mean old targets will be missed, and the ambitious target to produce 300 million litres of new water every day by 2030 is no longer possible.
Specifically, the Berg River-Voëlvlei project has been delayed by two years to 2030, the Faure New Water Scheme has been pushed back by a year to 2031, and the Paarden Eiland Table Bay Desalination project has been postponed all the way to the year 2036. This pontificating about Johannesburg’s water disruptions is a case of misplaced bravado and double standards.
Johannesburg is a city of diverse people and complex social and economic realities, with more than 50% of its population living in townships. It cannot afford the DA’s Cape Town blueprint, which focuses on interventions that narrowly appeal to investors and tourists while relegating transformation and social justice to the backseat.
An exclusionary vision for Johannesburg would carry severe consequences. The city of Johannesburg matches the entire Western Cape in population and rivals its economy, generating roughly 15% of South Africa’s GDP compared to the province’s 14.2%.
Cape Town, under the DA, is increasingly described as unaffordable for average South Africans, pushing both poor and middle-class residents aside.
Transforming Johannesburg into another well-decorated poverty cage that prioritises the rich and impresses tourists, without taking steps to dismantle the systemic barriers that trap poor communities in cycles of marginalisation, is not only unsustainable, but will make a bad situation worse.
Johannesburg and its residents do not need another privatisation experiment that treats public services as commodities, as the rejection of the e-tolls programme demonstrated. It needs an administration that will rebuild state capacity in order to intervene on behalf of and look after those at the bottom end of the economic pyramid.
Helen Zille’s candidacy, therefore, should be judged not only by her public statements but by the governing model her record represents. It is a model that has prioritised market efficiency and investment attractiveness over the deeper transformation needed to build an inclusive and equitable city.
Greg Schneemann is an ANC Member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature.
