Helen Zille

She was Mayor of Cape Town from 2006 to 2009, Premier of the Western Cape from 2009 to 2019 and DA federal leader from 2007 to 2015. She is the DA's candidate for Mayor of Johannesburg in the 2026 local government elections.

Career

Zille studied at the University of the Witwatersrand and worked from 1974 as a political correspondent for the Rand Daily Mail, where her reporting questioned the official account of Steve Biko's death in 1977. In the 1980s she was active in the Black Sash and the End Conscription Campaign. She worked at the University of Cape Town in the 1990s and 2000s, entered the Western Cape legislature in 1999 as education MEC, and sat in the National Assembly from 2004. She was Cape Town's mayor from 2006, DA leader from 2007 to 2015, and Western Cape premier from 2009 to 2019, winning 59.38% of the provincial vote in 2014. She chaired the DA Federal Council from 2019 to 2026.

Positions

Zille argues that local government's main task is delivering basic services such as water, sewage, refuse removal, roads, traffic lights and electricity. She calls for elected representatives who serve communities rather than enrich themselves and for administrations staffed by skilled officials chosen on merit and held accountable. As DA leader and premier she criticised the ANC government over crime, health reform and governance. Wikipedia describes her as a liberal, anti-apartheid politician, and the Institute of Race Relations has called her one of the country's loudest reformist voices.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · Wikipedia · The Star (IOL)

Photo: Helen Zille, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)