MANDY WIENER: Zille not vanilla. Helen Zille creates binaries. That’s what she is doing in Joburg.

We sat in her office at the DA’s headquarters in Gardens. She was wearing jeans, a DA shirt, and Skechers, and I listened for four hours as she answered my questions between taking calls about statements and politicians. She made her own tea and described herself as a ‘kanniedood’.

Helen Zille is Marmite. Either you love her or hate her. And that’s ironic considering her belief in binaries in politics.

Whether you respect her views or not, she is a tactician and thinks very carefully about the strategy. The optics and messaging are key.

Zille explained to me how, in politics, one has to create binaries. It’s an either/or option for voters.

‘Look, what you have to do in politics is create a binary, and you’ve got to create a stark binary. It’s this or it’s that. You’ve got to create a binary so that people face a stark choice. And you’ve got to know that there are a hell of a lot of people who will not like the choice that you are presenting to them. They will like the other choice. But they’ve got to know clearly what the alternative is.

And you’ve got to know that the choice you’e offering has a market, because there are many, many people who are vying for that market, especially our market.

‘So, you’ve got to create a clear binary that doesn’t involve all of your tiny competitors. It involves your main competitor. And then you make people choose your side of the binary. That’s how you deal with an election campaign. We created the binary very successfully. We had a very successful squeeze on the smaller parties by getting them onto our side of the binary, by being the very clear dominant part of that binary.’

It's important to understand that this is what Zille is doing in launching her campaign for mayor in Johannesburg. She is creating a clear alternative for residents. Either they vote for more of the same, or they vote for her.

She argues that for this to be achieved, the DA puts out really memorable collateral. They did this with the burning flag advert last year. Zille knew full well the impact the image of burning the South African flag would have.

Similarly, the DA did this in 1999 withits highly controversial ‘Fight Back’ campaign.

‘What we were saying there is our flag represents everything we treasure about being South African. If the EFF and MK get in with the ANC, this is what will happen to everything we believe in in South Africa. So don’t allow the ANC, EFF and MK to get in. And it was immensely powerful. Now you tell me any other ad that we ran during the election. You won’t know at all. If you ask anybody who was around at the time [1999] what the DA’s election slogan was, they will all say Fight Back. You’ve got to make an impact because 99% of the population is not concentrating on party politics. So to break the sound barrier with them is unbelievably difficult. And ideally, you want everybody to be talking about your ad.

‘Obviously, your opponents are going to misinterpret your binary. You want the fight. It was a very important and very good ad. You mustn’t think that because something is controversial, it’s bad. In politics, it has to be controversial to be good.

In fact, you must be controversial You can’t be anodyne and vanilla. I always say Zille, not vanilla, when I’m telling people how to take it.’

It could be argued that this is precisely what Zille created in her interview with Anele and the Club on 947 last week. She created memorable content. It was certainly not anodyne and vanilla.

Not everyone liked her binary. But those who did will vote for her in the local government elections. She has a market that she appeals to, and the binary she is creating is stark.