As the ANC self-immolates, Zille and Mashaba seize race for Joburg’s future

With the announcement on 21 February that ActionSA will field its president Herman Mashaba, the main race for Johannesburg’s mayor is now between him and the DA candidate, Helen Zille.

For the first time since 1994, the ANC is out of the leader board as it has not yet named a candidate, while Mayor Dada Morero is in a fight for his political life – against his own party.

Mashaba was persuaded to run because the city will be the bellwether for how the local government election turns out. We will vote anytime from 2 November to 31 January 2027, with most pundits pencilling in a late November date.

The founder of the Black Like Me hair product empire is the only political leader who has ever been able to bring out the city’s traditional black bases like Soweto for a different party, as this article from the 2021 election showed.

The ANC near flat-lined in Soweto and other major townships in 2024 as voters stayed away. The party was walloped to 34% in Gauteng in that election and when you drill into the numbers, it scored even lower in Joburg. That was before the chronic water and electricity crises kneecapped its people – impacting everybody, but traditional ANC voters and citizens most.

So now, it will be a race led by Zille and Mashaba, with the Patriotic Alliance candidate Kenny Kunene expected to declare soon.

Zille has been campaigning for months and declared her candidacy in September in a campaign calling for the city to go from ‘Dada to Gogo’ – Dada being the incumbent and Zille the ‘Gogo’.

While her team won’t release its weekly survey numbers, she is believed to be polling in the high thirties with a wildly popular campaign on social media and no need for a mass media campaign. She is all over the place: at Pikitup strikes, balanced on the edge of a huge pothole, her feet in the dammed water, showing huge dongas in the road and water leaks not fixed for months.

Gone is the anti-woke, conservative politician who once said colonialism was not entirely bad.

In vogue is the seasoned politician who speaks many South African languages, traversing both elite and working class, white and black Johannesburg. Her campaign’s working but Mashaba will crash it.

The charismatic entrepreneur is very popular with ordinary people for his business history, which makes him a homeboy made good – a figure well-loved in politics in South Africa.

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Joburg mayoral race: Herman Mashaba hints at return

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Zille told Daily Maverick here that she did not expect to get an overall majority but was aiming for the DA to be the largest party in Johannesburg after the local government election. Her energetic campaign is consolidating the party’s base and in December, the DA won a Hyde Park ward (where President Cyril Ramaphosa lives) with 97%.

The city’s water, electricity and other infrastructure failures impact all, but working and middle-class black and other citizens, who can’t buy out with solar and water tanks, are very angry, as letters to the Daily Maverick regularly show.

Historic voting patterns show they do not easily turn to the blue party, especially with its recent rightward drift. So Mashaba has a constituency to cultivate as he successfully did in 2021 when ActionSA won 44 seats in the 270-seat council – good for a new party. Mashaba was DA mayor from 2016 until 2019, when he quit the party and had to give up the chains even though he loved the job.

He gets bad press with the liberal elite of civil society who do not like his anti-foreigner stance or his Rudi Giuliani-style law-and-order focus. But among his constituents, those positions haven’t crushed his popularity.

Originally from Hammanskraal, Mashaba and his wife Connie Mashaba have been long-time Johannesburg residents. Connie was, until recently, the vice-president of the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce.

The race between Zille and Mashaba now puts the ANC in a difficult position: if the party fields either of its regional candidates (incumbent Dada Morero or the Johannesburg chairperson Loyiso Masuku), it definitely cannot win. The party has decided that its metro mayoral candidates will be chosen by the Top Seven leaders at its HQ, but it is a long way from making a choice while the two leading candidates will now go toe to toe.

In Joburg, the ANC has 91 seats, the DA 71, ActionSA 44 and the EFF 29, while the micro-parties trail behind. The Patriotic Alliance is the kingmaker party. DM