OUR CITY NEWS: Bosa mayoral candidate puts municipal accountability at the heart of Joburg’s renewal

Nobuntu Hlazo-Webster has encountered plenty of anger on the campaign trail in Johannesburg, but it is the growing hopelessness among residents that troubles her most. With less than a week before the 4 November local government elections, the Build One South Africa (Bosa) mayoral candidate is meeting people who have lost faith in politicians and doubt that voting will change their circumstances.After months travelling across the city, she says disillusionment has deepened since the last national election. Her instruction to campaigners is to leave every community with some renewed belief in its ability to change things, even when they cannot immediately resolve residents’ problems.“A people that has lost hope can become destructive. A people that has lost hope can die. The soul of the place can die,” she said.Hlazo-Webster remembers a very different Johannesburg from the one she encounters on the campaign trail today. When she first began travelling here from Durban for business, she found a city where ambition and ability seemed to matter more than connections, and where people willing to work hard could build something for themselves. It was enough to convince her to move here with her family more than a decade ago.Opportunity“If you have talent, if you have skill, if you have something to put on the table, there’s an opportunity for it,” she recalled. But the city that once seemed to offer endless possibilities has become increasingly difficult to live and work in, with unreliable services, deteriorating infrastructure and a municipal administration she believes has grown accustomed to operating without accountability.“Everywhere I go, one of my core messages is: please don’t accept the dysfunction. It is not normal… Don’t accept that you may have water today and not have it tomorrow. Don’t accept that you can go to a clinic and not be able to get help because there’s no water,” she said.Bosa leader Mmusi Maimane. (Photo: Sharon Serelto / Gallo Images)Before co-founding Bosa with Mmusi Maimane, Hlazo-Webster worked in business and economic development, including advising municipalities on investment and informal trading. She says that experience taught her how much work can go into developing plans that are never implemented, a frustration she has since encountered in Parliament, where departments can report meeting their targets while the businesses they are meant to support continue struggling to obtain finance and reach customers.“The plans are there; they just are not executed. And so, what I bring from business is the discipline of execution,” she said, arguing that the government should be measured against improvements in people’s lives rather than the number of activities it can report completing. She is particularly scathing about politicians celebrating modest service delivery achievements in communities that remain desperately underserved.“How can you, as a serious adult, be proud of one single tap in an entire community when you promise so much more?” she asked.Her proposed remedy involves appointing officials on merit, making their responsibilities public and enforcing consequences when they fail to deliver. In her first months as mayor, she wants residents to be able to track priority infrastructure repairs through a public dashboard, while the City improves the accuracy of its billing system and publishes details of the debts it owes.A more unified municipal administrationOver the longer term, she wants to bring essential services back under a more unified municipal administration, arguing that Johannesburg’s separately governed entities have created overlapping bureaucracies and fractured responsibility. She also wants the City to work more closely with business to attract investment and develop township economies, insisting that enterprises cannot grow beyond survival if electricity, water and other infrastructure remain unreliable.She acknowledged that structural change would take time, and her ambitions would have to contend with the City’s strained finances and another potentially fragmented council. Hlazo-Webster says coalition agreements should spell out what each partner is responsible for and what happens when promises are broken, rather than allowing parties to divide positions among themselves as political rewards.Nobuntu Hlazo-Webster, Johannesburg mayoral candidate for Bosa during an interview in Sandton, Johannesburg, on October 22, 2026. (Photo: OUR CITY NEWS / James Oatway) Plan“We make sure that there’s a plan that we are all coalescing around, that we’re all building around, that we all agree to, that sets out how we’re going to work together,” she said. Although Bosa’s campaign has attacked both the ANC and DA, she does not exclude either by name, instead insisting that corruption and a failure to serve all residents are unacceptable.To her, Johannesburg’s decline is as much a failure of political responsibility as it is a problem of neglected infrastructure. “When people’s dignity is being stripped, my dignity is being stripped,” she said, arguing that leaders have lost the sense that the hardships they allow residents to endure should trouble them personally.The demands of politics have also unsettled her own family routines. Asked how she balances campaigning, parliamentary responsibilities and raising her sons, she laughs: “Very not well.” Sundays were once reserved for church and cooking with her family, but campaigning has swallowed much of that time, although she has made it clear to her team that she will attend her son’s high school orientation even in the final days before voting.The fatigue has not dulled her belief that the people she meets still have the power to shape Johannesburg’s future. “Part of the work is reminding people you have power,” she says. DMThis interview is part of an ongoing series by Our City News featuring key mayoral candidates contesting the City of Johannesburg in the upcoming local government elections.