The battle for Joburg – Five political heavyweights to duke it out for coveted mayorship

Johannesburg, South Africa’s grand dame city, is tilting – and political heavyweights from Helen Zille to Herman Mashaba are lining up for the job everyone calls a poisoned chalice.

Exclusive new data from the Ipsos Khayabus survey shows that Gauteng voters are up for grabs. The numbers can be extrapolated to Johannesburg. 

“When we tested the reaction of South Africans to the statement ‘there is no political party that represents my views’, 43% of citizens in Gauteng agreed or strongly agreed with this statement,” says Ipsos director and political analyst Mari Harris.  

The Khayabus omnisurvey is South Africa’s largest in-home survey.

“Would-be voters feel uncertain and are not necessarily committed to a political party. Our politics is probably more in flux than it has been in a while.”

Asked to state a preference if an election were held tomorrow, those surveyed in Gauteng favoured the ANC (42%), DA (24%), EFF (14%) and MK party (8%), with the rest split among smaller parties, undecided or would not say. 

Taking this together with the finding that four in 10 people say no party represents their views shows the size of the political opportunity in the province.

An internal DA poll from the end of August showed the DA leading the ANC 37% to 31% in Johannesburg – probably reflecting a skew to the suburbs, where DA support is strong. It also showed that the party is struggling to break through in traditional ANC black strongholds where potential voters mostly stay at home to register a protest vote (not voting is the protest vote).  

What is emerging is that although the Joburg mayoralty may be the most chaotic job in local government, it is also the most coveted. Five contenders think they can save Joburg – a city in crisis but brimming with energy.

Candidates are lining up to be mayor and run for election in the 2026/27 local poll with more than a year to go. Two have formally announced their candidacy – the DA’s Helen Zille and the PA’s Kenny Kunene. ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba is considering a run. 

The ANC is still deciding whether to parachute in a high-profile figure, which may upset regional contenders, sticking to the incumbent, Dada Morero, or  choosing his party competitor, Loyiso Masuku.

Johannesburg’s people no longer trust politicians’ words, so all the candidates have their work cut out to win voters over. In 2021, only 43% of voters turned out. This number also shows the size of the potential opportunity.  

The Gauteng City Region Observatory found that turnout was lowest in townships, informal settlements and inner-city areas. Soweto, Orange Farm, Diepsloot and central Johannesburg had particularly low turnouts – bad news for the ANC. The suburbs’ turnout is better, which favours the DA.

Read more: Residents from Johannesburg’s Ground Zero of failure protest at council meeting

The candidates have their work cut out for them: Johannesburg’s finances are in a parlous state, and collections are low. The city is experiencing a water crisis and regular electricity outages, especially in impoverished areas. It has a traffic light and pothole problem that is often a national joke.

But it also has significant social capital, and people are increasingly doing things for themselves where they can. This energy is harnessed by social movements like the Water Crisis Committee and Jozi My Jozi. 

This business-funded, civil-society-inspired urban mission movement aims to energise people.

Johannesburg is an indefatigable and exciting city of almost six million people, waiting to be well led by a servant leader able to harness the spirit of the city.

Here are our short profiles of the candidates who want to run Johannesburg.

Dada Morero 

We start with the incumbent. The ANC may try to parachute in a big gun due to the damage to its reputation in Joburg, but for now, Dada Morero is the lead candidate. He is a calm leader. Faced with polycrises in Johannesburg, he never loses his cool. 

In demeanour, he is the quintessential cadre who also speaks the language of the ANC: think “socioeconomic transformation”, “high-impact social delivery” and “bomb squads”. Each of the entities meant to serve Joburg (such as Johannesburg Water, City Power, the Johannesburg Roads Agency and Pikitup) is packed with ANC cadres from the Johannesburg region, where he is also party chairperson. 

Morero’s budget speeches when he was the MMC for finance from February 2023 until August 2024 were creative, and his state of the city address in May was interestingly composed. But his biggest problem is that he is managing decline without a plan to lift the city. The cadre staff bill is too high, and he can’t reduce it. 

Therefore, the city under his administration is using capital expenditure (capex) and infrastructure spending to fund the wage and contractor bill. This bill, which accounts for about 18% of the R89-billion budget, is also a means of favouring cadre companies. The system is stacked against Morero’s success, and there is very little he can (or wants to) do to change it.

Read more: Council lies – strongwoman Helen Botes is still working for the City of Joburg

The city is debt-dependent and continues to take on more debt. Morero is the first Johannesburg mayor to receive a stern letter from Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana warning him to get a handle on the city’s finances. 

Morero is from Soweto, but this homeboy will have a tough time getting the vote out: election patterns show that this ANC stronghold has largely stayed home on voting days in protest against tepid service delivery. He has worked in the City of Johannesburg since 2004. He holds two master’s degrees and numerous other qualifications. He has been mayor twice (the previous time for less than a month in 2022) and now wants a third term.

Loyiso Masuku

We include two possible ANC candidates because the party is still deciding who its regional chairperson should be. It has been unable to hold an elective conference because of infighting and problems with branch verification (you know the story). 

The telegenic Masuku wants to be mayor. She has crafted herself an image as an Albertina Sisulu-cum-Winnie Mandela of the 21st century, and her ideas of gender mainstreaming are interesting.

She is now the MMC for finance, but in her previous role as MMC for group corporate services, she continued the pattern of stacking boards of entities with party cadres. Systems like billing, IT and property, all of which fell under her purview, did not shine during her term. 

Masuku has claimed a ratings upgrade from negative to stable as evidence of an early success, but she only took on the role in August. She rose through the political ranks, having started in the student movement, Sasco, and the ANC Youth League. She has worked in the Ekurhuleni and Gauteng administrations.

Read more: Powerless in the city – How Johannesburg’s electricity crisis is breaking its people

Helen Zille

The DA’s Helen Zille won the party nod in its primaries as its mayoral candidate in September. Her campaign was launched in Soweto and, in the first 10 days, she did more than 50 interviews. There is local and global interest in the veteran politician’s decision to move house to Joburg (where she was born, raised, went to university and became a journalist at the Rand Daily Mail), and take a stab at the role. 

Zille has experience, having served as the award-winning mayor of Cape Town and as the Western Cape premier. However, Joburg is a different kettle of fish with its three key systems (water, electricity and transport) undergoing serial crises. The city lacks a stable water and electricity supply, and its finances are in disarray.  

Read more: DA ahead of ANC in internal party polls as Zille declares water a top Joburg priority

In an interview with Daily Maverick, she said water would be her priority and Detroit’s turnaround would serve as a global example of what can be done for the struggling city. 

“It is impossible to live without water. You can live a very inconvenient life without electricity, but you can’t live a life without water. And that is the primary responsibility of a municipality: to deliver clean drinking water to all its residents for drinking, cooking and washing.

“The city I am going to learn the most from is Detroit. Detroit was as broken as Johannesburg. And they had a plan to turn it around. One of the things that I’m trying to do is look at examples from all over the world where new city administrators inherited really broken cities and turned them around,” she said.

Herman Mashaba

The founder of the Black Like Me cosmetics and hair brand has taken to politics like a duck to water. He joined the DA and became the mayor of Joburg from 2016 to 2019, where he was an energetic incumbent trying to shake the city out of the inertia that had set in. He started the GFIS – the Group Forensic and Investigation Service – and it made headway in dealing with rampant corruption and capture in Joburg.

Mashaba cast himself in the mould of Mike Bloomberg, New York’s businessman-­turned-mayor. He quit when he left the DA with Mmusi Maimane and went on to form ActionSA. In 2021, ActionSA gave the ANC a run for its money, especially in Soweto. The party now holds 44 seats in the council, a substantial bloc. 

Mashaba’s war on hijacked buildings morphed into anti-foreigner sentiment that could become right-wing populism. He was also never comfortable with Joburg’s thriving (and arguably exciting) informal sector and appeared to prefer a more staid business sector. In fact, the downtown area has a R10-billion economy, as the author and town planner Tanya Zack has found. 

Read more: Mayor, bomb squad go AWOL as hundreds of thousands of Joburg households go without water – again

Mashaba is still mulling over a run for Joburg mayor, and his A-team in the party wants him to throw his hat in the ring. ActionSA will only announce mayoral candidates in the new year.

Kenny Kunene

The PA’s deputy leader, Kenny Kunene, is back as transport MMC and will announce his agenda early in the new year, he told Daily Maverick. 

He is the party’s candidate for mayor of Joburg. He said his manifesto would focus on turning revenue collection around and mounting a drive against wasteful expenditure, which runs into billions of rands, according to the Auditor-General’s reports.

Water would be his next priority because it is a generalised crisis, but it hits areas with many PA voters particularly hard. Electricity supply and price would be his third priority. 

Kunene is concerned about the number of hijacked buildings, houses and businesses in the city and said he would move to expropriate hijacked properties. 

His urban vision is to build more tall buildings for housing and, in his own words, “job creation, job creation, job creation”. 

“If people work, they can afford to pay for services,” said Kunene. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.