Genocide in the City of Gold

On the 4th of November 2026, South Africa is holding its municipal elections. Johannesburg, the city built on gold and still the economic hub of Sub-Saharan Africa, has found itself in a mayoral race caught between politicians' moral stance on the Middle East and their ability to fix a decimated, chronically underfunded infrastructure.

Helen Zille is the Democratic Alliance's (DA) candidate for Johannesburg. In a system of proportional representation, the DA is the main liberal opposition to the governing African National Congress (ANC). 

Johannesburg began experimenting with coalition politics in which no party holds a council majority, so smaller parties determine who governs and price their votes accordingly. Unfortunately, there is no barrier to entry, often leading to hung councils where a party representing less than 5% of the population can determine how the city runs.

In 2022, Zille needed three seats held by Al Jama-ah, a small Muslim-focused party, to maintain the DA-led coalition against the ANC. Its leader, Ganief Hendricks, refused publicly. The reason he gave was that the DA's position on Israel was, in his words, "support for apartheid." These votes that would have gone to the DA went to the ANC. The coalition lost its majority, the sitting mayor was ousted within a year, and the revolving door that followed produced five mayors in three years.

Among them: a man under investigation for allegedly running a funeral Ponzi scheme and a man sacked for posting pictures of himself with a gun.. Then there is ANC candidate Dada Morero - he became mayor in 2022 when the DA candidate was ousted, only for a court to rule that this was invalid, only for him to be re-elected later.

Instability has caused major breakdowns. The city's chronic underfunding of repairs and maintenance has left spending at a fraction of the National Treasury’s 8% benchmark. For instance, Johannesburg Water confirmed in 2025 that the Hurst Hill reservoir was operating on bypass due to leaking issues, contributing to prolonged water shortages across large parts of the city. A 2025 report to Parliament found that non-revenue water stood at 44.8%, leaving the city with an annual deficit of almost R7 billion (roughly £314 million) to maintain its infrastructure, let alone fix what has already fallen into disrepair.

President Ramaphosa publicly expressed his disappointment with the state of Johannesburg, noting that the ANC - the party he rules - is failing and should copy how the DA runs cities, like Cape Town. 

Into this chaos, Helen Zille has arrived with a PR team that photographs her in an inflatable raft in numerous city sinkholes.

At 75, she is laughably still the most energetic person in the race. The ANC, in their usual style, is yet to name a candidate, leaving open the possibility they will simply keep Morero in post as if he bears no responsibility for the city's current state. Her other main rival, Herman Mashaba, a former DA mayor who left the party in 2019 to found ActionSA, has the name recognition but not the record. 

In Cape Town, Zille’s general track record suggests she knows how to act on what she is promising. She even won Mayor of the Year in 2008. The usual caveat is that Cape Town is smaller, and rarely do her supporters mention, or come from, areas like the Cape Flats.

But she is also famously the candidate who, when asked on television whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, said: "Genocide is a very big word. I haven't been to Gaza, and I don't know." When a man at a local campaign event recently shouted, "Where is your morality? How many more children must die?", she replied calmly that South Africa had "a different project": proving that Muslims and Jews could live together under a constitution. She was unscathed, as she invariably is. And obviously avoids the question in a manner ANC members have no issue addressing.

Local governments exist to serve a relatively small group of people's immediate needs. Being able to serve their needs through a proportional representation democratic system where coalitions are the inevitable state often requires political parties finding the least worst candidate. In other words, the ability to work with those you disagree with, and even dislike, so long as the citizens are being served, according to their democratic desires. Decisions which dismay many are unavoidable. Projecting that co-existence is possible regardless is therefore a laudable vision to propel. 

This pragmatism, however cooked with the same PR team that put her in the inflatable boat, is winning her popular support in a city tired of living in disarray. The DA's internal polling places her at 37% against the ANC's 31%. Yes, merely throwing a bone to Palestinian liberation to increase poling numbers would be two-faced. But what happened to the Zille who broke the story about the Apartheid government’s coverup of Steve Biko’s death? How much zeal must be shed to become an effective mayor of a city which, if it is not fixed soon, will no longer be the economic and financial hub of the continent? 

Adam Habib, former vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand and current Vice-Chancellor of SOAS, University of London, put it plainly: Zille's position on Gaza is hypocritical, her foreign policy is problematic, and she will do little for economic inequality. But none of that matters, he argued, because she is the only candidate with the experience and willingness to fix the city's water, electricity, roads and corruption. Everyone else, in his view, will simply break what little remains functional.

While I agree that Habib’s point is an apt description of the state of affairs, there is a larger part of me which finds such a descent to the bare basics depressingly ‘dull’. As South Africa continues to drift from the ANCs-slogan-but-no-action governance model, new questions surrounding what makes a good candidate naturally arise. And it is good, I suppose, in a healthy democracy, to have leaders who disagree, even if on the fundamentals of human rights, so long as they can provide the basic material human rights of water. But it is a position which could easily have been avoided had the major players involved provided less supine leaders.

Image: Flickr/Nico Roets

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