Former political commentator and activist Lukhona Mnguni has thrown his name into the ring to become Joburg mayor, serving under the banner of Rise Mzansi.
(Photo: Supplied / Rise Mzansi) The race for the Joburg mayor has a new candidate, with former political commentator and activist Lukhona Mnguni (36) throwing his name into the ring for Rise Mzansi.
Mnguni’s candidacy will be announced officially on Saturday, 23 May 2026, but hours before the announcement, he sat down with Daily Maverick over coffee in Woodmead, reflecting on the path that has brought him to this moment.
“I’ve always been an activist at heart in my entire upbringing, be it at home, in the church or university,” he said.
His activism stretches back to his student years at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the late 2000s, where was part of student politics and ultimately joined the Congress of the People (Cope), which he later left.
He then pursued a master’s degree in the United Kingdom, and from 2022, he served as the acting executive director and head of policy and research at Rivonia Circle, a non-profit think-tank and civil society organisation.
/file/attachments/orphans/LM2_737445.jpg "Rise Mzansi’s Lukhona Mnguni is vying to become Joburg mayor. (Photo: Supplied / Rise Mzansi)")
“The work that one has been doing as a public commentator on politics for the last 15 years, when I left the Congress of the People as a young, youth movement member, has been a way of contributing to the life of the country, deliberately for the political life of the country.
“I could have tried to pursue a career where I’d get a corner office but I chose to be in the public discourse to fight and fend off the things that threaten our country’s future and the future of our children,” Mnguni said.
In line with current research, Mnguni said South Africans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the state of the country – describing most as “jaded” and feeling a sense of “despair.”
Reflecting on the country’s political direction over the past 15 years, Mnguni said many South Africans did not believe the country was in danger back in 2009 because things still seemed normal – people had jobs and institutions still appeared to work. But after years of corruption, commissions of inquiry and multiple presidents, he said it had become clear that many state institutions were getting weaker instead of improving and that the situation had worsened.
As a result, Mnguni warned that unless South Africa fundamentally changes the way power operates, organised crime could entrench itself within the state.
“It’s quite clear that if we do not do something drastic about reconfiguring power dynamics in South Africa. There is a risk of this country becoming a gangster state in a real, real way that criminal syndicates will be the ones running the state with politicians as their runners.”
Mnguni’s decision to enter frontline politics was ultimately driven by the same activist instinct that shaped much of his public life.
As an activist, he said, “it’s very difficult to sit back entirely”. When he was approached to join Rise Mzansi and become its mayoral candidate, it was almost a no-brainer – he “jumped” at the opportunity.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_2985.jpg "Lukhona Mnguni, head of policy and research at the Rivonia Circle, has joined the Joburg mayoral race, running for Rise Mzansi. (Image: Supplied)")
Mnguni was born and bred in the town of Flagstaff in Eastern Cape but has lived in Joburg for more than a decade.
“I am not an imported mayoral candidate,” he said jokingly.
Mnguni joins the race alongside the Democratic Alliance’s Hellen Zille, ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba, Patriotic Alliance deputy president Kenny Kunene and the Inkatha Freedom Party’s Mlungisi Mabaso, whose cadidacy was announced last weekend. The African National Congress has not yet found a suitable candidate with its public nominations intake closing at midnight on Friday, 22 May.
Zille was the first out of the block and has been campaigning for months, calling for the city to go from “Dada to gogo” – Dada being the incumbent mayor, Dada Morero, and Zille being the ‘gogo’.
Mnguni doesn’t see Zille as competition, saying the former Cape Town mayor and Western Cape premier is a “complete cultural misfit” in Joburg and doesn’t represent the future.
Rise Mzansi was formed in 2023, so didn’t contest the 2021 local government elections. In 2024, it won 0.42% of the national vote, taking two seats in Parliament. It did slightly better in the Gauteng provincial vote, winning 0.98%.
DM’s five questions for candidates
Q: How long would it take you to get Joburg back on its feet?
A: Look, I think there are things that are low-hanging fruit, I call them basics. Those things should not take you more than a year to sort out, [such as] cleaning up the city. You’ve got to clean up Joburg. The kind of crime that is in Johannesburg is unacceptable.
I’ll just speak about Diepsloot. No bins, no skips. Go to Orange Farm and just see the sheer levels of dirt. Yeah, maybe illegal dumping, but there’s no infrastructure. How often does Pikitup go to Orange Farm? How often does it go to Diepsloot?
Do we see this waste management as just only for suburbs? So cleaning up the city is a top, top priority because I mean, a dirty, dirty city cannot attract anybody.
Q: There were at least a million power interruptions over three quarters, our partners at Our City News have reported. What is your energy plan?
A: Well, the energy plan is very clear. I think there needs to be a very good pact between the City and Eskom, because you’ve got the whole hybrid situation where some of the infrastructure in the city is what we call Eskom customers and then you’ve got City Power customers.
You need to clean up the governance at City Power. That’s the first [thing] you need to do, then think of ways of partnering with more institutions when you still don’t have the ability to procure enough resources and equipment, because some of these things you do through detection. You always need to detect the health levels of your infrastructure. I’m telling you now, if you were to ask for a registry of maintenance of the major infrastructure areas, you are probably not going to get it…
You’ve got a problem with illegal connections, which in some instances, they overload and overburden the infrastructure. And there, you need to go to communities and negotiate with them. It’s not to say you want to deprive people of electricity, but we’ve got to legalise the manner in which they are connected, because if your distribution network is not balanced properly, it is going to suffer and you will get outages.
Q: More than 30 years into democracy, the JoJo tank is the most important asset citizens are buying, hiring or covering. What is your water plan?
A: JoJo used to be seen as things of us villagers; nobody would think that seeing green and grey and brown JoJo tanks would be such a fashionable and lifeline thing...
The first thing you need to do within 100 days is to have a very clear, watertight master plan for rapid maintenance. […] Because we’ve got what we call city-to-city diplomacy, if it means you must tap into other sister cities across the globe to provide resources […]. And it’s not because we lack engineering skills per se. I think we lack the ability to procure equipment on time and to implement projects expeditiously.
We need to probably get to a point, and I’ve been a firm believer of this, [that] when we talk, water is [viewed as] a constitutional right, so it’s not just a service.
When we talk about provision of constitutional rights, I think we need a new framework of procurement altogether.
Q: Where do you live and what is your favourite park in Joburg?
I stay in Kyalami Hills and my go-to spot is the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens. It’s probably one of the well-kept features in this place of ours.
Q: What is a weekend like in the city for you?
A: I’ve not been doing political work, so weekends have been quite different. I have been doing a variety of things, either doing work in the civil society space, we’re doing workshops, meeting and greeting, or going to watch some play, or take my five-year-old to Bounce. I spend a lot of time with him on weekends when I can.
I like being in a community of people, so you’ll find that I spend a lot of my time having a cup of coffee, breaking bread, having dinner with different people, just trying to understand, you know, what people are up to, what is happening, but there’s often always something to do, but it’s usually around people. DM