Helen Zille’s “pothole swim” was a very effective DA election stunt in her campaign to become the mayor of Joburg. The ANC was embarrassed, with executive mayor Dada Morero himself visiting the gaping, water-filled trench, which has plagued Douglasdale residents for three years.
It may have been an election tactic, but it has exposed deep frustration among Joburg residents, which is also showing up in polling ahead of the crucial local government elections to be held between November this year and January 2027.
The Social Research Foundation (SRF) has pegged the DA’s support at 39%, the ANC at 30%, ActionSA at 10% and the MK Party at 8% in Joburg in its latest poll, released last week and reported on by the foundation’s media platform, The Common Sense. It is a tight race and looks set to end in another coalition. The city has had a bad run of coalitions since 2016, with no single mayor completing two years since Herman Mashaba stepped down at the end of 2019.
By-election analysis conducted by Victory Research’s Gareth van Onselen also indicates that the ANC’s support is in free fall. What is worse is that tracking by both Ipsos and the Human Sciences Research Council has returned findings that suggest South Africans are becoming increasingly jaded with multi-party democracy.
“This is what people have to live with in the City of Joburg,” Zille says of her pothole swim as the brief video closes, cutting to the DA’s campaign tag: “Believe in Johannesburg”.
She alleges that repairs are sporadically effected in the dead of night so that workers can claim overtime, or with the incorrect equipment, resulting in the problem never truly being resolved.
Morero posted a video from the site, showing that it had been repaired. He also urged Zille to refrain from swimming in standing water as it encouraged children in townships to do the same, which could be dangerous for them.
Zille’s deputy campaign manager Thamsanqa Mabhena, however, says the repair work didn’t last very long and the pipe has already begun leaking again. He tells the FM that the campaign does not have to search very far for examples of poor service delivery. Zille’s office is inundated with calls from residents and even former city officials, providing insight into where things are going wrong.
Joburg is set to be a key battleground in the election.
Despite all indicators pointing in a negative direction for the ANC, it has yet to select candidates for the metros
While Zille’s campaign has got off to a flying start, the ANC (despite polls showing what deep trouble it is in) has yet to begin any visible campaigning. The FM understands that neither Morero nor his deputy, Loyiso Masuku, the new ANC Joburg chair, will be the face of the party’s campaign and its mayoral candidate.
The ANC kicked off the process to select its mayors last Thursday. Powerful groupings in the ANC are eyeing political heavyweights to take on Zille.
While opinion polls such as the SRF’s are revealing (its research captured sentiment accurately in 2024), by-election cycles also neatly establish support for the various political parties, particularly when they contest the vast majority of them, which the ANC does.
Van Onselen warns that by-election tracking is vastly different from opinion polls, such as those conducted by the SRF or Ipsos. The reason they are different, he says, is that they are not random.
“You don’t ever get a truly random sample, which you need to accurately gauge support levels. However, the parties differ in how readable they are in terms of long-term trends and they differ by how many by-elections they contest.
“The ANC is by far the most powerful indicator in that track, because it contests almost every single by-election as a matter of policy, whether it’s going to do well or badly. So it has contested something like 98.5% of all by-elections since September 7, 2011.”
He has just begun tracking by-elections through their cycles, referring to the five-year period between local government elections. So far, he has waded through IEC data relating to 1,440 by-elections across the country, dating back to 2011.
“The DA contends half the by-elections that the ANC does and it is more strategic. It chooses by-elections in which it’s going to do well or grow, or if it has to defend a ward, so its percentage is inflated a bit.” That trend gets stronger with parties such as the Freedom Front or the Patriotic Alliance, which contest only a handful of elections “and make sure they choose ones where they’re going to do exceptionally well,” says Van Onselen.
Still, he adds, there is value in tracking their by-election performances because you can compare them with previous election cycles.
Crucially, he has found that the ANC has been on a downward slide and that its performance in by-election cycles generally correlates with its subsequent local election tally. In the current 2026 cycle, its average by-election performance stands at 34% on a monthly average.
The EFF is the next party which is relatively easy to track, because it contests almost as many by-elections as the ANC.
The party has been through a slight dip in its national election support in the 2024 election. Its decision to remain out of the government of national unity and the departure of popular leaders, including former deputy president Floyd Shivambu, implies that the party is on the back foot.
However, Van Onselen says this is not what the by-election numbers show.
The EFF’s support, he says, “suggests that it’s holding up quite well. It’s tracking better than it did last year. It’s on or around 10%. The advent of MK and its poor national result don’t seem to have affected the EFF’s baseline support, which seems solid as far as by-elections go. That will be encouraging to the EFF. It’s not growing or shooting the lights out, but it seems to be steady.”
MK’s support in the 2024 election seems to have come almost entirely at the expense of the ANC.
The finding by Van Onselen is interesting, indicating that the EFF’s shift in tactics after the 2021 local government election, when it decided to enter formal coalitions and take up council posts, has handed it a solid hand of cards over other parties, which is yielding results at local level.
The DA’s performance in the current cycle stands at about 44%, which Van Onselen says is inflated given the strategic way the party selects which by-elections to contest. However, he adds that when you conduct a comparative analysis with previous cycles, there does seem to be an improvement in the party’s performance.
MK and the IFP are also difficult to track — because their performance in KwaZulu-Natal far outweighs their national performance.
In the end, Van Onselen’s tracker illustrates that the upcoming local government election is set to mark another setback for the ANC.
Despite all polls and indicators pointing in a negative direction for the ANC, it has yet to select candidates for the metros. And its commitment to the framework agreement on coalitions that its national executive committee adopted is in doubt, given dynamics at provincial level.
Electoral performances aside, a key worry across political parties should be the findings of the HSRC poll, conducted for the Independent Electoral Commission. These indicate that the vast majority of South Africans are losing faith in and disengaging from democratic processes, due mainly to the economic conditions in the country and to corruption.
Of those polled, 68% are dissatisfied with democracy and only 17% satisfied, a huge decline since the mid-2000s. More than one in four South Africans, or 26%, see nondemocratic options for running the country as preferable.
The finding indicates that political parties are not simply battling each other, but a growing apathy towards the democratic process among ordinary citizens — a truly dangerous position for South Africa’s 32-year-old democracy.
Marrian is a political analyst at the Bureau for Economic Research
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