Service failures make a case for Zille in Joburg

DA Gauteng Chairperson and Cadidate for Johannesburg Mayor for Johannesburg, Helen Zille addresses delegates at the congress after casting her vote during the Johannesburg Regional Elective Congress were delegates chose the leaders who will lead the DA into the local government election. Pictured at Prison Break in Johannesburg, 28 March 2026. Video: Nigel Sibanda/ The Citizen Call it political theatre or grandstanding – and you’d be spot-on.

That doesn’t make DA Joburg mayoral candidate Helen Zille’s snorkel in a massive mini-lake, caused by a burst pipe, any less worth thinking about. Zille’s point was that this has been recurring for three years in Douglasdale – because teams which come to repair the pipe don’t do it properly. Failure to do repairs or maintenance correctly, resulting in repeated trips to fix the problem, is not just common in the City of Joburg, it is the very symbol of our decline.

How many power outages have been caused because “cable faults” have not been repaired properly… often blamed on “inclement weather”. There’s always been rain in Joburg – why so many problems now? We can think of one plausible reason: if the problems are fixed right, first time, there won’t be the opportunity for the contractors to earn more money, or for employees to be paid even more overtime.

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It’s that sort of slow sleaze – and parasites feeding off the slowly collapsing city – that Zille is promising to fix. To be sure, Zille is not everyone’s cup of tea, but can she be any worse than our current suppliers of free street pools?

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