Geordin’s travels: Hill-Lewis hit the campaign trail harder than Ramaphosa and Malema - News24

“It’s been a busy, busy campaign season,” says Cape Town mayor and DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis.

He is standing meters away from the Atlantic Ocean, the quintessential view of Table Mountain at his back, addressing a media scrum following a stump speech and hanging the DA’s latest poster on a pole on Marine Drive, in the Cape Town suburb of Table View.

“Obviously, I’m looking forward to the end of it, but we have seven days to go, and this is the time now where we have to turn all of this potential, this amazing potential that we see in our polls, and that we can feel on the ground, that we turn it into reality by turning out the votes.”

This was on Tuesday, and it was Hill-Lewis’ 29th campaign stop since the start of August.

Of the leaders of the four biggest parties in the 2024 elections, the ANC, DA, MK Party (MKP) and EFF, Hill-Lewis has spent the most days campaigning between 1 August and 26 October. He had 28 events during that period, averaging every third day. And that excludes all the travelling time criss-crossing the country.

“I’m trying to spend the week, Monday to Friday, in Cape Town, and then the weekends, you saw this weekend, I was in Mpumalanga and Durban. And that’s been a nice regular pattern now that’s worked through the campaign.

“And, of course, this weekend, we will be back in Gauteng for our national final rally. So it’s been a very, very busy campaign. It’s been a long campaign.”

Of the four leaders under the microscope, Hill-Lewis has been on the campaign trail the most on weekdays. Altogether 18 of his 28 events between 1 August and 26 October were on weekdays.

Ramaphosa mostly campaigned on weekends, with 14 out of 23 falling on weekends. Malema was even more of a Weekend Special: 15 out of his 18 events fell on Saturdays and Sundays.

He attended several provincial manifesto launches through September and early October, then went quiet for a month before a furious final week from 17 to 25 October.

Malema’s style is to hit up to three municipalities in a single day, sometimes crossing provincial boundaries in the same day.

Of the four leaders, he is the only one to campaign in eight provinces since 1 August. The only province he hasn’t visited is his home province of Limpopo. However, the EFF’s birthday rally, this year doubling as a manifesto launch, was held in Thohoyandou, Limpopo, on 25 July, just outside the dataset’s start date. Malema was also the only one of the four leaders to reach the Northern Cape during the period considered.

Compared to the other three leaders, Hill-Lewis is in a unique position because he is also an incumbent mayor and campaigning to remain so.

Between 1 August and 26 October, two-thirds of Hill-Lewis’s campaign events were outside Cape Town.

August was his busiest month. He opened with a voter-registration drive in Alberton on 1 August, launched the DA manifesto at Mary Fitzgerald Square, Johannesburg, on 8 August, then ran a KwaZulu-Natal doubleheader – uMngeni with Chris Pappas on 12 August, and Pinetown, eThekwini, the next day – before returning to Cape Town for a Khayelitsha candidate launch. The Working For All Tour took him to Tshwane, eThekwini, Ekurhuleni, Nelson Mandela Bay and Johannesburg in sequence. He capped August with a jobs pledge in Montague Gardens, Cape Town.

September took him to the Garden Route for two days of community meetings across George, Sedgefield, Knysna and Wilderness – smaller Western Cape towns the other leaders ignored entirely. He was back in Ekurhuleni on 18 and 19 September, the second visit to the metro after the discovery of women’s bodies there.

October narrowed to Cape Town: the Belhar rally, three nights embedded with metro police in Mitchells Plain, and a District Six billboard unveiling. He closed with rallies in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga and eThekwini, KwaZulu-Natal, on 24 and 25 October.

At the time of his ascension to the DA’s leadership in April, questions had been raised within the party and among the commentariat about how Hill-Lewis would balance being mayor and leading the party. This election campaign has arguably been his first test on this issue.

“You know, I’ve had to spend some days out of the city, travelling around the country. Yes, absolutely,” he said, speaking to News24 on the sidelines of Tuesday’s event.

“But, you know, that comes with the job. I’ve also spent a heck of a lot of time campaigning in Cape Town.”

He sees his role on the campaign trail outside the province to support the mayoral candidates.

“Really, I mean, the focus of any local government selection is the mayoral candidate. So, it is right that the most visible person in Joburg has been Helen (Zille), the most visible person in Ekurhuleni has been Khathutshelo (Rasilingwane), the most visible person in Tshwane has been Cilliers (Brink).

“And so those campaigns should not be about me. They should be about our person, who we are putting up as mayor there. And so my job has been to go and support them on the campaign and act as a champion and a cheerleader for their campaign.

“But it’s actually been about them. They’ve been the heroes of that campaign,” Hill-Lewis said.

News24’s recent poll by the SABI Strategy Group has shown that while Hill-Lewis has a high favourability rating in Cape Town, overall, 27% of South Africa’s metro inhabitants have not heard of him. This means his name recognisability is not great.

“I’m not worried about it because I haven’t campaigned really until now outside of Cape Town. So, everyone in Cape Town is familiar with me, but you know, we’ve got three years before the 2029 election. Then, obviously, it has to be much higher.

“But I’ve got time to work on that. So it’s for now, the focus must be on the mayor’s and the mayoral candidates.”

And there has been a strong focus on the mayoral races in Gauteng’s metros, not only from Hill-Lewis.

It is the province that hosted most of Hill-Lewis’ campaign events outside the Western Cape.

The vast majority of Ramaphosa’s campaigning was in Johannesburg, with a particular focus on his former hometown, Soweto.

In contrast to the DA and EFF, the ANC doesn’t have mayoral candidates driving their campaigns, so apart from Ramaphosa, other national ANC leaders like Gwede Mantashe, Fikile Mbalula and Nomvula Mokonyane have been very active on the campaign trail.

Malema spent less time in Gauteng than Ramaphosa and Hill-Lewis, but did venture off the beaten track, having rallies in places like Nkomazi, Kokstad and Heilbron.

It is hard to compare Zuma’s campaign to that of the other three leaders. The octogenarian was hospitalised on 6 October after falling ill while campaigning in Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal, and spent 11 days in a Pietermaritzburg hospital.

The MKP cancelled its final Siyathatha rally, scheduled for 18 October, and distributed its manifesto electronically instead. His son, Duduzane, took over much of the campaigning.

Even before his illness, Zuma’s campaign wasn’t as extensive as his rivals’. Nine days to Hill-Lewis’ 27, three provinces to Malema’s eight, and no Gauteng or Western Cape at all. Five of those nine days were spent visiting traditional kings in the Eastern Cape. His only conventional campaign appearance was the Phoenix volunteer launch on 20 September. The rest was church speeches, palace visits and a prayer meeting in Durban.

Toqan, an AI tool, was used to manage the dataset and create the graphics. 

News24 surveyed 5,001 registered voters to reveal who leads, what voters want fixed, and which coalitions South Africans could support.

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