OPINION: If Joburg’s best days are ahead, let’s stop looking backwards

By Michael Beaumont

On a good day Helen Zille is a polarising figure, on a bad day she is a wrecking-ball to race relations in South Africa. This is why it is not surprising that a strategically placed article to soft-launch Zille’s mayoral campaign in Joburg caused the stir that it did.

To place the bias upfront, it must be acknowledged that the Helen Zille who led the DA in 2007, at the time when many joined the party, was regarded as a remarkable leader. It was the Helen Zille of 2019 who alienated not just former supporters but many others when she became the poster grandmother for the DA’s shift to the right.

Amusingly, some commentators have misread the political mood and assumed that the DA’s opponents fear a Helen Zille mayoral campaign. This assumption warrants correction. In reality, nothing would please ActionSA more than for its opponents in