At the time, Herman Mashaba’s decision to quit as Johannesburg’s mayor in 2019 seemed to deal a blow to any prospect that South Africa’s opposition parties would end the long rule of the African National Congress any time soon.
As the maverick businessman fell out with the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party, the ANC returned to power in the country’s financial hub despite voter anger over its many corruption scandals.
But today, as Africa’s most industrialised economy starts to look ahead to national elections in 2024, Mashaba has re-emerged as a major power broker in any post-ANC future. He took that position after the governing party’s disastrous performance in local polls last month, when it won less than half the vote for the first time since apartheid ended in 1994.
Mashaba — an entrepreneur who built a hair products empire at the tail end of apartheid in the 1980s, before turning to politics — stunned South African politicians in the wake of November’s municipal elections by pushing the DA, his former party, into a minority governing position in Johannesburg and other major cities in Gauteng, the industrial heartland.
No party won overall control in the vote and the DA had rejected a coalition with Mashaba’s new party, ActionSA.
Mashaba instead persuaded his ideological opposite, Julius Malema’s leftwing radical Economic Freedom Fighters, to make sure the ANC was kept out. They voted in the DA without a formal coalition in place. That means the main opposition will have to depend on their votes, for example to approve budgets.
“My agenda was always to remove the ANC from power,” Mashaba told the Financial Times in an interview. “This is a criminal enterprise, not a political party.”
The feat has put President Cyril Ramaphosa on notice: his party could be the loser in any future coalition if rolling power blackouts, record-high unemployment and his failure to tackle corruption similarly deliver the ANC less than half the vote in the next national election.
But it could also risk political instability and splitting the opposition, given that the DA is still to formalise full coalitions to run all the cities in Gauteng, where basic services such as power and water are falling apart.
The DA must work with other parties, said Mashaba, who became Johannesburg’s first post-ANC mayor in 2016, only to leave the DA amid party infighting. “For the DA to run [these city governments], they either have to go to the ANC or come back to real life” and work with other parties, he said.
From his home in an affluent Johannesburg suburb, a relaxed Mashaba said his former party had been taught a lesson.
Mashaba said the idea to work with the EFF to keep the ANC out of Gauteng’s city governments came to him in the shower the morning of the vote to appoint Johannesburg’s mayor, after late-night talks with his former party ended without a deal. Despite having just called Mashaba a “political illiterate,” Malema’s party agreed.
If the unusual arrangement survives, ActionSA could use it as a template to wield outsized national influence in 2024 — as an upstart that has benefited from flatlining support for the DA.
ActionSA was established just over a year ago and in the local elections opted to target only major cities where the ANC was vulnerable. But it gained 16 per cent of votes in Johannesburg, and is already the joint fourth biggest opposition party at a national level.
“We are the only political party that appeals to all South Africans,” and that is attracting former DA and ANC voters alike, Mashaba said, pointing to the party’s performance in ANC strongholds such as the sprawling Johannesburg township of Soweto.
ActionSA believes in free markets, but also social justice in a society that has grown more unequal since apartheid, Mashaba said. Critics say its strategy to gain support includes populism and stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment.
Though Mashaba has said he condemns xenophobia, he has taken a hard line on immigration in a country where undocumented foreign nationals are often blamed for crime.
“You can’t just open your borders and say everyone must come in,” he said, adding that he was “unapologetic” about focusing on illegal immigration.
ActionSA is setting up campaign machinery across South Africa for the national elections, Mashaba said. “Come 2024, we are going to contest all nine provinces.”
Although ActionSA worked with Malema’s group to unseat the ruling party from local governments, nationally “a coalition of the ANC and EFF would be the most disastrous for this country,” Mashaba said.
For many of Mashaba’s critics, that underlines how the political marriages of convenience he has arranged will not last. This week Ronald Lamola, the ANC justice minister, said the DA and EFF were like a couple that had paid a bride price, where the bridegroom’s family pays the bride’s family for her hand, yet also insist they are not married.
Meanwhile Mpho Phalatse, Johannesburg’s new DA mayor, is yet to appoint key officials because the terms of co-operation with other parties are still in the midst of negotiations.
Even so, that has not stopped analysts from viewing the next election through a whole new political calculus — including the possibility of a Mashaba presidency.
South African presidents are elected by parliament, not directly, which will raise the stakes for Ramaphosa and the ANC if the party returns with less than half of MPs after the next election, even if it remains the biggest party.
Mashaba said it was “too early to say” if South Africa’s highest office might enter his sights. “I’m not even sure that I’ll make myself available to be the presidential candidate” of ActionSA, which will elect the position through a competitive primary, he added.
