JOHANNESBURG — The ground outside Mayor Herman Mashaba’s downtown Johannesburg office is shaky. Drills are whizzing and tools are clanging, the rumble of the construction site reverberating through the first citizen’s royal blue drapes and into his air-conditioned chambers.
“Would I have built it? Absolutely not,” says Mashaba of the gleaming $21 million cylindrical edifice with a golden crown circling its rim. “You know how many houses I could have built? But it’s here. I have to live with it.”
The new opposition mayor in town might be living with the new council chambers his African National Congress predecessors signed off on, but he’s less prepared to tolerate the party’s other legacies.
The days of Nelson Mandela’s proud and promising ANC, which has run South Africa since the first democratic elections in 1994, have waned. Under President Jacob Zuma, who first took office in 2009, the party has been plagued by internal factional struggles, corruption scandals and troubling inefficiencies and mismanagement in everything from education and policing to sanitation and electricity, making violent protests a regular feature on the country’s streets. Johannesburg is no exception.
“We have deep-rooted problems: high unemployment, housing backlogs, massive infrastructure backlogs, a city hijacked by criminal elements and a hostile ANC doing everything possible to collapse my government,” says Mashaba. The straight-talking Democratic Alliance mayor has occupied his new digs since September with the support of a loose coalition of opposition parties that unexpectedly snatched power from the ANC, making Johannesburg the fourth of South Africa’s eight big cities with DA mayors.
Six months ago, not even a bookie would have taken the odds on Mashaba. The wildly successful 57-year old businessman is a libertarian opposed to minimum wage in a country where 30 percent of the population lives on social grants. But if he can run the city better than the ANC, it could be the tipping point of the 2019 national elections.
Those elections will decide not just who controls Parliament but who will lead the country’s nine provinces. With the DA in power in the Western Cape since 2009, the possibilities of taking the economic powerhouse of Gauteng aren’t just fanciful notions of a deluded opposition.
Sure, it’s a longshot, but some are now willing to wage their bets.
“The ANC has served their glorious past but the world is changing,” says Moeletsi Mbeki, a political analyst and brother of former President Thabo Mbeki. “I think they will lose Gauteng — and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were borderline on the national elections.”
But Tim Cohen, the editor of Business Day, the country’s most respected daily, isn’t so sure that’s a possibility — or that Mashaba’s the right man for the job. “The determination he must have had to succeed in business makes me think he won’t be a successful politician, especially in a coalition government with a far-left grouping. He’s not very compromising.”
That far-left grouping is the raucous Economic Freedom Fighters, which is demanding nationalization of banks and mines, and it’s key to the success of the coalition governing arrangement. While the DA, still fighting off the perception of being a “white party,” has a changing racial profile with 36-year-old Mmusi Maimane at the helm for the past two years, the DA won’t be able to garner the kind of black power the EFF has been able to mobilize since it launched in 2013. By the time local elections came around in 2016, they were already able to take an impressive overall 8 percent of the vote, compared to the DA’s 27 and the ANC’s 54.
Mashaba, a self-described “capitalist crusader,” seems to be acutely aware of the fragile alliance he’s beholden to.
“Can I operate thinking that I have a blank check? No,” he says. “The success of my government is totally dependent on consultation.”
So far, so good. The loose coalition has backed Mashaba’s drive to root out corruption, setting up a forensic unit which has already identified more than 100 licensing officials involved in fraud, leading to the arrest of 15 with many other individuals and departments under investigation.
But Mashaba — whose first job in civil service is this one — will be the first to tell you: “The amount I know about politics is dangerous.”
Many would agree — and they wish he would watch what’s coming out of his mouth, including members of his own party.
Since December, Mashaba has been telling anyone who will listen that undocumented migrants aren’t welcome in his city, laying the blame for the country’s porous borders on national government. His comments play directly into anti-foreigner sentiment which resonates across the economic scale, but particularly with the poor who are left to compete with foreigners — largely black and from other parts of the continent — for scarce resources. Mashaba has not only riled up civil rights groups nervous about stirring xenophobia after violence against foreign nationals in 2008 left an estimated 60 people dead, but he’s also given the ANC ammunition, leaving the DA to defend their usual position on the moral-high ground.
Mashaba isn’t likely to back down. He’s on a rule-of-law mission that began the day after the 2014 presidential elections that brought Zuma — who initially came into office after shrugging off corruption and racketeering charges and has faced all sorts of corruption allegations ever since — back into power. That’s when Mashaba decided to join the DA.
“People were too scared to not vote ANC,” he says of those black voters who stayed away from the polls, preferring to stay silent rather than register their vote for anyone other than the party that liberated them. “I wanted to start an awareness, a revolution. Voting for a political party should be on the basis of their policies. I’m not going to vote because they are my friends or they belong to the same race or clan.”
In a country where “white monopoly capital” discussions dominate parliamentary discourse and “coconuts” are routinely sneered at, Mashaba has the confidence and power of his skin color, along with his extraordinary apartheid-era black business success. Call him a sellout — or compare him to Donald Trump because he’s a businessman, political outsider and immigration hardliner — at your peril. Mashaba has the street cred that’s the stuff of legend.
He grew up in a township outside Pretoria, the youngest of five children raised by his domestic worker mother. In high school, he was a small-time pot dealer running dice games on street corners. He dropped out of university when it shut down during apartheid protests, and got a job as a salesman for a black haircare company before starting his own brand, Black Like Me.
Mashaba is going to need the sort of unwavering determination it took to succeed against all odds under apartheid to govern the unruly, post-apartheid city of Johannesburg.
Mbeki thinks he’s just what South Africa needs.
“The ANC government has been made of high school teachers, freedom fighters and anti-apartheid activists who know how to complain and organize against the powers that be,” he says. “What we need now is more Herman Mashabas — business people who know how to build.”
More from U.S. News
Nigeria’s President Launches a Controversial Morality Campaign
Kenya Finds a New Way to Curb Large Number of Traffic Deaths
In South Africa, Some Prostitutes Demand the Chance to Sell Sex – Legally
Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba Takes on the ANC originally appeared on usnews.com
