Helen Zille’s Great Trek to Jo’burg

By R.W. Johnson

Helen Zille’s candidacy for the mayoralty of Jo’burg has attracted a good deal of attention, mainly because she is rightly credited with having turned Cape Town around after the disastrous mayoralty of Nomaindia Mfeketo (ANC) who was accused of mismanagement, nepotism and corruption. Indeed, anyone who lived through Mfeketo’s reign can attest that in that period one scandal followed another on a weekly basis. Cape Town had never known anything like it and the local populace, always rather proud of the “mother city”, were considerably shocked. Later, when Mfeketo had become the South African ambassador in Washington DC, she was accused by an embassy worker of involvement in witchcraft and attempted murder, but this caused barely a ripple in Cape Town where her municipal misdeeds were more sharply remembered.

Cape Town is a complicated and diverse city of five million which includes some of the finest real estate on the planet and also some of the worst and most dangerous slums. Its transport system is squeezed between the sea on one side and mountains on the other, giving it the worst traffic jams in the country. The collapse of rail services under ANC administration hit Cape Town particularly hard, for the railways had played a key role in delivering commuters to the central city.

Crucially, under Nationalist rule the city was a Coloured Labour Preference Area, which meant that the African population was kept to a minimum. This meant that unlike other South African cities, Cape Town had no vast African townships – no Soweto, Thembisa, Umlazi or KwaMashu, providing relatively decent accommodation. So when the pass laws broke down in the 1980s and the city’s African population soared, the result was the growth of vast informal settlements, most particularly Khayelitsha. The result is that Cape Town’s African population is worse housed than in any other major city and there is a huge and permanent housing crisis.

This leads many black critics to allege, quite erroneously, that the DA lavishes care only on the white suburbs and neglects African areas. This is completely untrue. The city council has laboured mightily to improve things – Khayelitsha is far better serviced than any comparable settlement under ANC administration and even has municipal libraries. By comparison, under Mfeketo’s ANC administration there was no budget allocation at all for upgrading informal settlements.

Like any city of its size, Cape Town needs a competent city council with strong executive leadership. Typically, the really great mayors have served long terms: Fiorello La Guardia, generally regarded as the best mayor in US history, ran New York from 1 January 1934 for exactly 12 years, while the legendary Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago ran the city from April 1955 to December 1976.

But in Cape Town the merry-go-round of municipal politics has militated against that. Since the present system of executive mayors began in 2000 the city has had no less than ten mayors. When the present mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, reaches November 2025 he will be only the second mayor (after Patricia De Lille) to have served for four years or more.

Helen Zille had been a DA MP for less than two years when she resigned in order to become mayor of Cape Town. She was already clearly the most likely person to replace Tony Leon as DA leader and he had already privately intimated his wish to resign, which he did only months later. Helen then put her name forward but said that, if elected, she intended to remain as mayor. I happened to run into her at a social event and told her that I thought this was a mistake. The party leadership and the mayoralty were both difficult and full-time jobs and it was virtually certain that she would have to short-change one or the other.

She was clearly displeased at being challenged, and said that Jacques Chirac had simultaneously been mayor of Paris and Gaullist party leader. I had witnessed Chirac up close for many years and said, yes, as a result he was always rushed off his feet and convinced by the last person who spoke to him, which was why Mitterrand had so consistently outwitted him. A party leader needed time to think, read and reflect. The job couldn’t be done properly if you were always on the run.

But Helen elected to do both jobs. Inevitably, the mayoralty won out: any large city generates endless crises and demands, and Helen was a hyperactive mayor, working long hours and rushing from pillar to post. Crucially, she told all the municipal staff that she was not interested in who they voted for. But now the DA was in power she expected them to follow instructions from the DA majority. Anyone who persisted in taking their orders from the ANC would be violating their employment contract. In fact Zille had to get rid of the City Manager, Wallace Mgoqi, a recalcitrant ANC activist who continued to take his orders from the ANC, but in the main the municipal workforce recognised that she had the city’s interests at heart and worked with a will under her.

Zille undoubtedly did a fine job as mayor but, of course, the party leadership was much neglected so that there was a good deal of complaining by leading DA MPs that they hardly ever saw the party leader and had almost no opportunity to discuss anything with her. This may have been why Helen, though elected to a five year term as mayor, lasted only three years.

What happened after that was not pretty. Zille’s assistant, Grant Haskin, held the fort for two months and then Dan Plato took over for two years. Probably the best word to describe Plato’s administration was “lethargic”. Quite why the uninspiring choice of Plato was made – presumably by Zille – is unclear. All the energy of the Zille administration disappeared, complaints about the municipality’s governance increased and its performance was, at best, mediocre. Then, however, Plato was replaced by Patricia de Lille thanks to a deal done by Zille in which De Lille’s Independent Democrats were folded into the DA in return for which De Lille got the mayoralty.

During the first democratic Parliament the DP had given De Lille considerable assistance: the DP were experienced Opposition campaigners while De Lille was wholly ignorant of the way Parliament worked and needed all the help she could get. The relationship was not a happy experience. At its end the feeling in the DA was that De Lille couldn’t be trusted, that she had a visceral dislike for the DA, that she ran her own party as a complete autocrat and had no democratic instincts at all. So when Zille began to court De Lille she was strongly advised by her own party elders to have nothing to do with her. Zille  ignored this advice too and handed over Cape Town – the jewel in the DA’s crown – to someone who was bound to affront the Cape Town DA.

It was a disastrous deal. De Lille never truly dissolved her own party but effectively kept it as a shadow party within the DA. She was accused of conflicts of interest regarding various private sector developments in Cape Town and a businessman, Anthony Faul, accused her of demanding a R5 million bribe. She centralised all appointments under herself and used her position to give jobs to cronies.

Finally she insisted on closing down the city’s Special Investigations Unit despite the strong opposition of the city’s leader on safety and security. This led to further accusations that De Lille had benefited from security upgrades at her home at the public’s expense. Ultimately the Cape Town DA charged De Lille with misconduct, including allegations of criminality, intimidation and other misconduct. She was effectively sacked as mayor and immediately founded her own party, Good, and made a deal to enter the ANC government.

After more than seven years of De Lille as mayor Cape Town badly needed an energetic and competent mayor. Instead, Ian Neilson sat in for two months and then it was back to Dan Plato again. The complaints about the municipality’s performance quickly took off but Plato was in office for three long years. During this period the ANC’s Western Cape leader, the notorious Marius Fransman, occupied most of the headlines with allegations of all kinds made against him including a long-running sexual harassment case. In the end Fransman, a strong supporter of Jacob Zuma, was suspended from the ANC and was forced to step down from his position. He then founded his own party, the People’s Movement for Change. As soon as Plato’s mayoral term was over Plato too joined this party, thus confirming the low opinion of him held by many in the DA.

Happily, Plato was succeeded by Geordin Hill-Lewis who has been a welcome change, energetic, enlightened and effective. Hill-Lewis has been politically savvy enough not to emphasise the failings of previous DA administrations but it is clear that in many areas he is having to solve problems which should have been dealt with long ago. And vast problems remain particularly in sewage treatment, transport and infrastructure. And the fact is that Cape Town simply cannot afford any more lackadaisical or deficient mayors. The city is growing so fast that it has to race to keep up with burgeoning demand. Indeed, the city will double in size in a few decades and probably a whole new city needs to be built on the West Coast.

It is worth keeping this picture of Cape Town’s last twenty years in mind. Undoubtedly, Zille’s initial three year stint was crucial in stopping the rot begun by the Mfeketo administration but it was only the start of a much longer process. In the period that followed and particularly during the nightmarish De Lille period the city failed to master the demands generated by rapid growth and instead the process was largely driven by property developers. There was a great deal of insensitive development, particularly on the Cape Peninsula, with large new housing estates gobbling up areas of natural beauty. Fortunes were made and spent on over-developing the Atlantic Coast strip, leaving it clogged with far too much traffic and frequently overwhelmed by tourist demand.

Now that Helen Zille is running for the Jo’burg mayoralty, some hard questions need to be faced. Jo’burg is a city in the wrong place, with no natural water supply, and the working-out of the gold mines mean that it is probably a city in long-term decline. The fact that Anglo-American will now, as Anglo-Teck, be headquartered in Vancouver is more than just symbolic. To be sure, more than twenty-five years of ANC rule has done enormous damage and even stabilising the situation will now be very difficult. Zille herself has said that probably it will take ten years to turn the city around, and that may be optimistic.

It is a good beginning that this time Zille is giving up her party duties as head of the DA’s federal executive – though this does pose problems for the DA. Steenhuisen is the weakest leader the DA has ever had. He has never made a  inspiring, memorable or just plain interesting speech and he is prone to sudden, disastrous lapses of judgement – referring to his ex-wife as “roadkill”, hiring Roman Cabanac as his chief of staff or giving furious ultimata to the ANC and then meekly folding. It has, through all these episodes, been a reassurance for many that the more experienced Zille, a steadying liberal presence, sits behind him. With her gone, the pressure to replace Steenhuisen will surely increase.

Meanwhile, there are questions galore about Jo’burg. A first question is, if Zille is indeed successful and can lead a reforming coalition administration in Jo’burg, how long will she stay ? She will be nearly 76 if/when she becomes mayor and she quite clearly won’t last the ten years required to turn things around. If she stays only three years, as in Cape Town, she will hardly get started.

Jo’burg’s municipal labour force has grown by 84% in the last few years. These employees will all be deployed ANC cadres and they will all be unionised. The workforce needs to be cut by at least 50% simply so that some money is made available for maintenance, but no doubt resistance will be fierce and if Zille is in coalition with a rump ANC – who will fight to keep their cadres in place – it may be well nigh impossible. That battle alone could easily occupy all three years.

Secondly, Jo’burg’s current budget is R89.4 billion. The accumulated demands due to neglected maintenance run into the many hundreds of billions, perhaps even a trillion or more. Meanwhile that budget is honey-combed with every possible sort of racket from ghost-jobs to rigged and padded contracts, tenders allocated to family members, arrangements with the construction mafia, the water tanker mafia and so on and on. Zille does not lack courage but this is a job for not one but many sheriffs aided by skilled investigators. If even a decent start is made to unpicking this huge ball of barbed wire, the sheriffs and their deputies will be in great physical danger. They will all need comprehensive security protection.

Thirdly, as the example of Cape Town makes clear, there has to be a succession plan in place with really competent people lined up to take over the mayoralty when Zille goes. Jo’burg simply cannot afford a Plato-De Lille scenario. The harm done by the Mfeketo administration in Cape Town was inflicted over a relatively brief period and it didn’t take too long to undo it. Jo’burg is much further down the slope of decline and reform will take a sustained effort over a long period.

Beyond that, of course, there are many other issues. At the moment no one in their right mind would lend money to Jo’burg so it is urgent that its credit rating be restored. That can’t happen unless the city starts collecting all the money it is owed and that too will require major reform. But before even that the chronic mis-billing of rates and charges has to stop. Each of these steps will require a major and sustained effort.

One has to hope that voters will also have learned some painful lessons. The most important of these is that it is folly to entrust any town or city to the governance of the ANC (or the MK or EFF). Any of these parties will simply ransack and loot until the town is bankrupt and falling down. Already many towns have been plundered beyond repair – Mangaung/Bloemfontein, Buffalo City/East London, Makhanda/Grahamstown and Msundusi/Pietermaritzburg are all examples of that.

This seems to be a peculiarly South African problem – Dakar, Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and Kampala have all avoided such a fate. For whatever reasons, African nationalism in South Africa seems absolutely inimical to urban civilisation. In less than thirty years it has brought Jo’burg, Africa’s economic capital, low. Given a few more years it might reduce it back to bare veld. This too would be a good subject for a presidential talk to ANC councillors by Ramaphosa, but one doubts that either the president or his listeners have much appetite for that.