MICHAEL MORRIS: Few have what it takes to lead the City of Gold - Business Day

Michael Morris

I hope Helen Zille reads Tom Eaton’s cautionary opinion from TimesLIVE last week and I am probably not alone in hoping she discounts it. (“Why the Zillefication of Joburg is mission impossible”, August 22). It’s a good piece.

In light of the “prospect of Helen Zille running for mayor of Johannesburg”, Eaton raises two important questions about the citizens of SA’s tatty economic capital: who is invested in changing the city, and who is invested in resisting change? 

Of all SA cities, Eaton writes, “Johannesburg has by far the largest demographic of young, upwardly mobile people whose plans don’t feature a home in the city 30 years from now, and who, as Joburg’s reputation and prognosis get worse and worse, become even less likely to see it as a good place to settle.” Will they care enough? 

Others, on the other hand, “might feel threatened by the DA’s promises of transparency and enforcing the rule of law”. To acquaint yourself with these people, Eaton correctly points out, you need “simply read any news report in which some new scandal has been exposed or some comically inept buffoon is defending his incompetence and accusing his critics of a political plot”. 

“We don’t know how deep the rot goes in the City of Gold,” he goes on, “but urban collapse is fantastically lucrative (just think of water-tanker tenders) and it’s safe to assume that there is an entire parallel economy in the city the existence of which depends on bad government.” 

Reading Eaton’s piece, I was taken back in an instant almost 20 years to the early days of Zille’s tenure as mayor of Cape Town, and my editor suggesting I spend a day with her to get a sense of what was considered — in 2006 — the novel phenomenon of a DA mayoralty in democratic SA. (Hard to believe today, but the party won just 6.6% of the Western Cape vote in 1994.) 

When I put this to Zille, she said, simply: “Pick a day.” Of course, you can’t tell in advance what a day in the life of a politician is going to yield, and until late morning I had little more than desultory notes on inoffensive comings and goings and banter among the staff. And then a new official appeared. Having been ushered in, he began almost apologetically: “I just wanted to alert you...” 

I was all ears. It turned out that a significant ratepayer had failed to pay rates for two years, running up what at the time I described as a “staggering bill”, and was about to have the water supply to its swanky Foreshore high-rise cut off for 10 minutes as a warning that the city meant business.   

The officials, I immediately saw, were as interested as I was to see if “the reporter” would be permitted to remain and report what ensued. I was. The defaulter, a major financial institution, was stalling, quibbling about one or another detail. After some to-ing and fro-ing — though not much — Zille finally said, “Give me a number.”

She phoned the bank, cut to the quick and came away with a swift resolution. I still remember that call. “Good morning. I am Helen Zille, the mayor of Cape Town, I believe you owe us R1m in unpaid rates.” 

I am sure calling Johannesburg to heel will be harder. But whoever tries will have to have Zille’s confidence and clarity of conscience, as well as the political courage to show what being answerable means. 

Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2025-08-25-michael-morris-few-have-what-it-takes-to-lead-the-city-of-gold/