After nine months of canoes, potholes and viral videos, Helen Zille's campaign is entering a more serious phase. The DA believes 500,000 votes could deliver an outright majority in Johannesburg - but low voter registration and voter apathy may prove the biggest obstacles.

On the campaign trail for nine months now, the DA's mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille, has changed persona.

From the Margaret Thatcher-style leader who ran the DA with an iron fist and who wrote a book against 'woke-ism', the political ideology under attack by the white right everywhere, Zille is now DJ Gogo, who wants to run Joburg. In a rather nice leather jacket and GOAT T-shirt combo, as a DJ dancing in the city's clubland, you can ring the changes. Joburg is a party, woke and progressive city, so a persona change was deftly executed.

Her innovative campaign uses skits and clever memes to highlight the collapsed service delivery in the city. She's canoed in flooded roads, fished in abandoned and decayed public swimming pools and ziplined over plentiful dongas that make mobility a real hassle.

On The Common Sense podcast, she said that the party could achieve an overall majority of about a million votes (two per voter), and recently said the DA needed 470,000 votes to win. Earlier, Zille told Daily Maverick that the aim was to be the largest party in Johannesburg after the 4 November election so that she could become...