“Send Gogo in” has become a catchphrase for Joburgers bewailing the state of the roads and other utilities. Mayoral candidate Helen Zille’s antics involving traffic jams, sinkholes, water leaks and other service delivery failures have set social media on fire.
Tami Jackson, who moved to Joburg six months ago to focus on Zille’s digital strategy, refuses to take all the credit. “There’s a whole campaign team. My job is essentially to make Helen’s campaign more palatable to the public in a way that is short, simple and impactful. Helen makes it easy because she is by nature a fun person.”
The first video that led to the city-wide obsession with “Gogo” was when Zille stepped into a road to direct backed-up traffic. “It was my second day on the job and when we saw that the lights were out, Helen decided to direct the traffic. I filmed her, and when I posted the video it just took off.”
Next was the Linbro Park pool. “This was also super-spontaneous. Millions of litres of clean drinking water had been leaking for two weeks. I suggested Helen put her feet in the water before she spoke about all this waste in the middle of a massive water outage.”
Then came the sinkhole swim in Douglasdale. “That wasn’t my idea,” says Jackson. “The residents were so happy to see Helen, they egged her on. One of them offered her a swimming costume and snorkel gear and off she went to change. Jacques the videographer and I looked at each other and went, ‘OK, I guess we’re doing it.’”
The Soweto rowing adventure was also spur of the moment. “Someone complained about a road being flooded because the stormwater drains were blocked, so we got an inflatable boat and shot the video in less than an hour. The same with the rat-infested Windsor swimming pool and the dilapidated tennis court. The most organised stunt was the zipline, which we used to put into perspective how massive that sinkhole is.”
Whether planned or spontaneous, Jackson says the guiding principle is to “use these things as hooks before we say what people need to hear. For every funny thing we do there are 12 serious things. The point is to get people’s attention and then deliver the important information.”
Helen has always been an inspiration for me. I don’t fangirl over politicians, but she is one of the few I look up to
— Tami Jackson
Jackson grew up in Elsie’s River in Cape Town. Her involvement with politics began when she arrived at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2016 during the Fees Must Fall protests.
“Even though I was sympathetic to the movement, it started aligning with certain political parties that I didn’t agree with. I asked myself where all the centrist people were in this whole debate, and that’s what made me sign up to be a DA member on campus.”
Jackson switched from chemistry to politics, economics, law and then marketing before deciding that academia was not for her.
“I used to carry a lot of shame about not completing a degree, but 2026 has been such a liberating year and now I talk freely about it. I don’t know what I’m going to do after this campaign, but I’m excited to see what it will be.”
At UCT she joined the DA Students Organisation and was elected to the student representative council on the DA ticket. After leaving, she took an internship at the provincial legislature when Zille was Western Cape premier.
“Helen has always been an inspiration for me. I don’t fangirl over politicians, but she is one of the few I look up to.”
Jackson was chosen for the DA Young Leaders programme and then appointed as a proportional representation councillor on the Cape Flats, while also helping with social media for the party’s internal campaigns.
“I get frustrated when I hear people saying that poor people in Cape Town do not get the same services as wealthy people. I have interrogated it at subcouncil level and it’s just not true. But when I try and rebut this, as a coloured person who has not only worked for the DA on the Cape Flats but lived my entire life there, I get called weird names like ‘tea girl’ or told I’m ‘trying to kiss up to my white masters’ — whatever the hell that means — just for telling the truth.”
Regarding her youth, Jackson says: “I don’t think of myself as Tami in her 20s working for the DA. I just think of myself as a South African in the party. I went to my first branch meeting when I was 19. Nobody stopped me because of my age, and I’ve been involved ever since.”
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