JOHANNESBURG, Gauteng — Johannesburg cannot afford another unstable coalition government, Democratic Alliance mayoral candidate Helen Zille has warned, as she brought her year-long campaign in the City of Gold to a close with a final rally in Nasrec.
Addressing supporters on Saturday at the DA’s last event of the local government election campaign, Zille argued that the country’s economic hub has been failed by fragile political arrangements and says her priority is competent, honest administration focused on basic service delivery.
Fix the finances, then fix the pipes
The core of Zille’s pitch was fiscal repair before infrastructure repair. Her stated first steps are to stabilise the city’s finances, cut wasteful expenditure, overhaul the billing system and direct revenue toward essential services.
“The money you pay for water must go to water,” she told the crowd, adding that electricity payments must likewise be spent on fixing electricity rather than disappearing elsewhere in the budget.
Those funds, she said, would go toward replacing ageing water pipes, repairing substations and putting the city’s deteriorating road network under a proper maintenance programme.
Zille, the seasoned politician fielded by the DA to rescue Johannesburg, said corruption would not be tolerated under her administration and insisted the municipality needs leaders who understand the work they are supervising.
Put honest, capable people in charge, she said — engineers who understand engineering, financial managers who understand finance, and officials who actually serve the public.
“I don’t care what your WhatsApp group is,” she said. “I care whether you can do the job and whether you are honest.”
Youth unemployment frames the closing pitch
Johannesburg is a key battleground ahead of the municipal polls, and political parties across the spectrum are pinning their hopes on young voters. The DA is no different — and organisers said the majority of those at the Nasrec rally were young people.
Zille acknowledged the psychological toll of joblessness on that constituency, describing it as crushing for young people to wake up on a Monday morning and stand on a street corner with no place in education, further education or training, and no access to economic opportunities to work or to trade.
That exclusion, she said, had been crushing young people’s spirit — but she pointed to the demographics of the rally itself as evidence that the mood is shifting.
The 2016 coalition and the warning against a repeat
Johannesburg, like many South African municipalities, currently operates under shared power. The DA first ascended to power in the city in 2016 through a coalition, an arrangement that later crumbled.
Zille said hard lessons were learned from that period. The party held office, she noted, for only a very brief time, and did so within a nine-party coalition in which it did not even hold a majority and had to rely on the EFF to stay in power.
“We’re not going to do that again,” she said, repeating the pledge for emphasis.
Her message to voters was blunt: if the electorate chooses chaotic coalitions and hands the DA a minority arrangement that depends on the EFF, “they’ll have to live with that chaos” — and her party will go into opposition instead.
The closing rally in Nasrec therefore served a dual purpose: a list of municipal promises on billing, water, electricity and roads, and a warning that Johannesburg’s next government must be stable enough to deliver them.
