DA Federal Council Chairperson Helen Zille has officially thrown her hat into the ring to possibly become the next Mayor of Johannesburg.
Zille confirmed to the Sunday World that she had submitted her application to the DA before the deadline on Friday, 13 June.
Zille said she was heavily lobbied by party insiders “for a long time” to stand as Joburg Mayor, to bring stability to the City of Gold.
Her possible candidacy was first reported on by Rapport after it was leaked to the media.
Speaking to Benito Vergotine on the Honest Truth last week, before she had made her final decision, Zille said this is still a lengthy internal selection process that lies ahead before she is selected as the preferred candidate to run for Joburg Mayor.
She says she will undergo the same vetting process as any other applicant, which includes a thorough internal review, including vetting, written submissions, internal assignments and interviews.
Zille says if she does get the opportunity to lead the City, she would begin by looking at what is working in Johannesburg.
“They’ve got really very good people. That’s the good thing about Johannesburg. They’ve got people who are passionate about the city and you’ve got a lot of them putting their money together and doing what has to be done in order to fix parts of Joburg, which is an extraordinary contribution that they are making. So it’s got great people.”
But she adds that the City’s finances are in a shambles.
“The most extraordinary thing is that I don’t know what they’ve done with their money. I do not understand the structures of that city and how it works. They have got at the moment about 3 weeks of cash reserves. Now you know you’ve got to have months of cash reserves if you want to run a viable city.”
She says the City’s electricity, water and roads entities are in the red by R20 billion each year.
Zille also talked about how she would go about addressing the City’s R200 billion infrastructure backlog with a budget of only R86 billion.
“This is one of those classic things that you have to eat the elephant one bite at a time. You’ve got to have a plan to do it, and you’ve got to do it in what we call the whole of society approach. The city can’t do it on its own. It’s got to be public-private partnerships. There has to be an enormous number of actors in that partnership so that we can get going.”
On a question about lessons she learnt as mayor of Cape Town, Zille candidly said while there are lessons, Cape Town wasn’t nearly as broken as Johannesburg is now, as the ANC was in power in Cape Town for about six years before the DA took over.
“And you can’t really destroy a city in six years. But in 30 years, it’s a completely different story and we are seeing in Johannesburg, for example, the consequence of not spending on maintenance for 30 years. And then it looks like that. And it is like that. So you’ve got plenty, plenty, plenty of water because it rained so much this year, but they can’t get the water into the reservoirs. The reservoirs are broken, and they can’t get the water through the pipes from the reservoirs into people’s homes.”
If Zille gets the green light to stand as the DA’s candidate for Joburg Mayor, she will contest the position in the next local government elections, which are scheduled to be held sometime between November next year and February 2027.
She is reportedly one of 8 candidates in the DA who are vying to contest the position.
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