By Ntando Thukwana
Helen Zille, who chairs South Africa’s second-largest political party and is running to become mayor of Johannesburg, says fixing the water crisis in the continent’s richest city will be her top priority.
The no-nonsense former Cape Town mayor threw her hat in the ring at the weekend before upcoming local elections that will be a litmus test of whether her Democratic Alliance can win votes from its main rival, the African National Congress, amid voter anger over poor public services.
“The number one priority has to be to get to stabilize the water,” Zille said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Johannesburg office on Monday.
“No one’s going to invest in a city where there’s no water” or where the water supply is sporadic, she said.
The 74-year-old led the DA from 2007 to 2015 and currently serves as its Federal Council chairwoman.
Her party, which is part of a national coalition government formed by the ANC, after it lost its majority in last year’s parliamentary elections, sees a chance to win Johannesburg, where a water crisis is one of many public-service problems that have piled up for years.
A date for the municipal vote has yet to be set, but it must take place before the end of January 2027.
The DA’s key appeal will be a better track record of running local government. The party got an unexpected endorsement from President Cyril Ramaphosa, who recently suggested that his ANC colleagues learn from its smaller rival.
Johannesburg, which is the wealthiest city in Africa and the nation’s commercial hub, is Exhibit A in the DA’s campaign.
In addition to the water crisis and frequent power cuts caused by equipment failure, businesses have fled the city center and it has changed mayors 10 times since 2016.
The council needs more than R200 billion for maintenance and overdue upgrades across its collapsing road, power and water networks, Bloomberg reported last year.
Zille said she would refocus the city’s budget away from funding a bloated bureaucracy toward repairing and modernizing its infrastructure.
Johannesburg, a city of 5 million, loses almost half of its daily water supply through leaks.
“The most important thing in a local government budget must be maintenance and infrastructure and expansion of infrastructure, “she said. “The curse of this country is we don’t do maintenance.”
If she wins, Zille will also establish a public-private partnership unit to cut red tape and “create a fast track for any private-sector company that wants to partner with us to resurrect the city.”
Other priorities include building up the city’s manufacturing capacity, rooting out corruption and boosting employment.
“Unemployment is the big problem and people think of government as the solution,” she said. “It is not the solution. The private sector is the solution.”
Zille, whose blunt comments have courted controversy, said voters who want stable government have two options — the ANC or DA – which should trump any qualms they may have about her.
“They don’t have to like me. Lots of people don’t. They don’t even have to like the DA, “Zille said. They just have to want stability in their government.”
BLOOMBERG