Helen Zille, the DA’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, tells Gabriel Makin that drug abuse is the thing that breaks her heart the most on the campaign trail. Going door to door, she has walked into homes where the parents are on drugs and the children are malnourished, and she says the plundering of the city’s infrastructure for scrap metal feeds the habit. Grannies in Soweto ask her to help them get their grandchildren into rehabilitation they cannot afford, and children are being raised in retirement villages because their parents are addicts. She warns that the crisis will destroy the next generation far more than apartheid did.

Helen then explains what she would do: take child addicts between 11 and 18 out of the communities where they became addicted and into farms with boarding, trades training, and rehabilitation, because there is not a single live-in rehabilitation centre for that age group. The conversation ends with a moment that leaves Gabriel lost for words.