ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba. Picture: Nigel Sibanda
There are two kinds of kids at a school concert. Those who freeze at the sight of a big crowd and those who grab the microphone to steal the show.
Former Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba is the second type, and he has found a willing enabler in a Gauteng premier who’s also obsessed with the spotlight.
Mashaba was popular in many quarters while Joburg mayor and looked to capitalise on this with the launch of ActionSA in 2020.
An old ActionSA election poster still sits on a street pole on my way into the office, it reads “Gatvol with politics? Register to show them”. It drove home his message of being different to other politicians, where action was more important than image, and an antidote to the ANC and its problems.
Even when coalitions seemed likely, Mashaba promised his voters that ActionSA was “happy to work with other political parties if they are willing to work with us. But us, as Action SA, will never work with the ANC”.
But a turbulent second election saw the party’s support drop by over 5% and 338 000 votes in Gauteng. When May’s election results were in, ActionSA’s provincial stronghold held only 163 000 voters.
This led Mashaba to go all in. Left in the cold with little to offer, ActionSA shot out the gate to promise a real opposition to the brewing ANC-DA coalition.
When they saw this gained little traction and political attention, they ditched it for power via the backdoor.
Mashaba found a willing collaborator in Premier Panyaza Lesufi, who took his own political gambles by leaving the DA out of his provincial Cabinet and was looking for a crack in the DA-ActionSA-FF+ voting block to exploit.
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In desperation, Mashaba reneged on his central promise to never work with “the devil“. He said the party’s supporters in Johannesburg relied on ActionSA to save the city, remove ANC puppet mayor Kabelo Gwamanda, and reverse a newly implemented R200 prepaid electricity charge.
In exchange for putting an ActionSA member as speaker in the Joburg council, booting Gwamanda, and ditching the tariff; ActionSA would vote with the ANC.
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Suddenly his promise given only weeks earlier “that a vote for ActionSA would never be used to keep the ANC in power,” seemed hollow. He had just pulled a page from the book of politics he had told his supporters to ditch.
He argued correctly that you can’t fully make a difference from the sidelines and that a position of power allowed ActionSA to hold the government accountable. But in our democracy, this responsibility should be given in the voting booth, not in secret meetings by those scared of losing power.
If the crusade was to save Joburg, it did not end in ActionSA getting some power and then fixing the issues it saw.
Instead, the holy war spread to other parts of Gauteng where the ANC no longer had power, and Mashaba’s demands were being replaced with excuses.
He started making noise about problems in Tshwane and a toxic relationship with the DA, at the same time as Lesufi was vowing to remove that metro’s mayor.
Once adamant about the R200 electricity charge being ditched before he worked with the ANC, Mashaba changed his tune overnight, saying it could only be scrapped next year.
A fact as convenient as the coalition he is now part of.
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