News24 | Helen Zille spins BMW ‘gusheshe’ in latest campaign stunt

DA Johannesburg mayoral candidate Helen Zille, 75, releases campaign video showing her spinning a BMW 325i “gusheshe” in her latest unconventional campaign stunt.

Screengrab of video/Facebook

• DA Johannesburg mayoral candidate Helen Zille, 75, released a campaign video showing her spinning a BMW 325i “gusheshe” in her latest unconventional campaign stunt.
• This follows a series of viral stunts, including swimming in a Douglasdale pipe burst, canoeing in flooded streets, DJing at a nightclub, and an AI-generated rap video.
• Her swimming stunt successfully forced the City to fix a three-year-old pipe burst.

Helen Zille’s election campaign just got interesting. The 75-year-old DA Johannesburg mayoral candidate is now spinning cars. Yes, you heard right.

Zille recently launched her latest campaign video showing her behind the wheel of a blue BMW 325i, popularly known as a “gusheshe”, doing doughnuts in a cloud of tyre smoke.

While many of her age mates are probably knitting blankets and taking leisurely walks with their grandchildren, this gogo is hitting the campaign accelerator hard, quite literally spinning almost out of control in pursuit of votes.

The former Western Cape premier and DA federal council chairperson has turned unconventional campaigning into an art form, and her latest petrol-head persona is just the newest chapter in a series of increasingly audacious stunts designed to draw attention and get her votes.

Earlier this year, Zille made headlines when she was filmed “swimming” in a water-filled trench in Douglasdale, Johannesburg, the result of a three-year-old burst pipe that the City of Johannesburg had failed to fix.

DA Johannesburg mayoral candidate Helen Zille, 75, releases campaign video showing her spinning a BMW 325i “gusheshe” in her latest unconventional campaign stunt.

Screengrab of video/Facebook

The stunt worked. Not only did it go viral, but it spurred the City into action.

Mayor Dada Morero responded with his own video and moved to address the long-neglected pipe burst.

But Zille didn’t stop there.

She’s been filmed canoeing through flooded streets caused by leaking municipal pipes in Soweto, turning infrastructure failures into impromptu water sports.

She’s scaled the walls of dilapidated buildings in the Johannesburg CBD, literally climbing to new heights to highlight the City’s neglected properties.

She’s waded through potholes, transforming crumbling roads into campaign photo opportunities.

READ | Zille’s Joburg swim sparks action on 3-year pipe burst, inspires Mayor Morero’s own video

But it’s not all about broken infrastructure. Zille has also shown her lighter side, or perhaps her desperate wish to connect with younger voters.

She’s taken to the decks as a DJ at a nightclub, spinning tracks instead of policies.

And in perhaps her most surreal campaign moment, she appeared in an AI-generated video rapping on a hip-hop beat, jumping on a viral trend where social media users swap faces and bodies into a 2022 live performance of American rappers Quavo and Takeoff’s song Hotel Lobby.

Now, with the gusheshe video, Zille has tapped into another cultural touchstone.

The BMW 325i, affectionately known as the gusheshe in South African car culture, is synonymous with spinning, a motorsport subculture that has deep roots in South African black and coloured areas.

Whether the 75-year-old spinning a car will translate into votes remains to be seen.

As Johannesburg voters head to the polls, they’ll have to decide whether they want a mayor who can spin a car, or one who can actually fix the City.

“Other parties will spin you stories, we’ll spin into action,” Zille says as she signs off.