JUSTICE MALALA | Mashaba jumped into bed with ANC without knowing who will be mayor of Tshwane

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has been spewing a load of bull in his attempts to justify his decision to hitch his wagon to the ANC in Tshwane after years of telling us he would never touch the organisation with a barge pole.

Last week Mashaba outdid himself when he said that the super-incompetent former mayors of eThekwini and City of Joburg — Mxolisi Kaunda and Kabelo Gwamanda — “left behind cities in far better condition than [ousted mayor Cilliers] Brink does in Tshwane”. 

You really must be desperate for attention to believe that Kaunda, who sided with people looting his city in 2020, and Gwamanda, an incoherent ANC puppet, left anything of worth in their destruction of these two fine cities. Only in a country where we have lowered standards to the extent that we have would you find such utter failures being exalted by an opposition leader. 

It does make you wonder: if Mashaba thinks that Kaunda and Gwamanda are the gold standard, what then is he promising us? We are in trouble.

In Tshwane over the weekend, those who flourished through their connections during successive ANC administrations in the past were rejoicing. The good times, they said, were here again.

Mashaba has come under immense pressure over his support for the ANC and its ousting of the DA’s Brink in Tshwane last Thursday. He has after all blathered on about never, ever, supporting the ANC. After the 2021 local elections, the ANC approached Mashaba with a proposal for a coalition government. He responded: “I have asked them to wait for my call; I will call them. But I know that it will not happen, not even in 300 years.” 

Mashaba will regret his decision to support the ANC in its ouster of Brink from the mayorship. That regret will come soon, too, as the ANC reverts to type and does what it has done best at successive municipalities. Mashaba should have visited a municipal office, any municipal office, in Tshwane on Friday morning. It was just hours after Brink was ousted with much toyi-toying and jubilation among ANC-aligned city workers. The culture of civil service (such as arriving at work on time and being at one’s desk until knock-off time, which I know from bitter experience didn’t exist under the ANC) that Brink was trying to entrench was already taking a beating. At the sad-looking Ou Raadsaal building, for example, security guards were turning people away on Friday, telling them that there was no work because there is no mayor, and it was payday. 

In Tshwane over the weekend, those who flourished through their connections during successive ANC administrations in the past were rejoicing. The good times, they said, were here again. The sentiment, from the many people I spoke to in the city, was that this was a chance to loot as whatever new administration comes in is not expected to last for long. A dark and dirty period looms for the capital city. 

It is a measure of what is to come that the ANC cannot even agree who it will elect as mayor. The party’s leaders in the region want their chairman, Eugene “Bonzo” Modise, to ascend to the mayorship. The Gauteng provincial leadership wants former regional leader Kgoši Maepa to take over. The ANC at national level has its own ideas about who should lead, but regional leaders are already threatening to unleash the rioting and violence that enmeshed the region in 2016 when the national ANC tried to deploy Thoko Didiza to the city as mayoral candidate.

Mashaba seems to have jumped into an alliance with the ANC without an ironclad agreement about who will become mayor. ActionSA’s Nasiphi Moya had been lined up as the likely mayoral candidate, but the ANC resolved that the party with the most votes should take the mayorship, thus placing its candidate in pole position. These geniuses organised a coup d’etat without even agreeing beforehand who will take over from the current mayor. It boggles the mind just how anyone can believe that good things will come out of this. 

The point I do want to make, however, is that despite his flip-flopping and hyperbole, Mashaba is correct about one thing: Brink’s mayorship has been terrible for Tshwane’s formerly black areas. Decay is everywhere. Basic services in Hammanskraal, Soshanguve, Mamelodi and others have deteriorated markedly or been stopped over the past few years. 

I have made this anecdotal example before: road construction in my mother’s village was arbitrarily stopped, leaving huge dongas and closed roads. Many roads are impassable today and to get to my mother’s house I sometimes have to leave my car some distance away. Many parts of the village are not navigable. 

This is just one example of many. The DA has run Tshwane on-and-off since 2016. The ANC was terrible before then, but the DA has been far worse, certainly in the formerly black areas of the city. Like him or deride him for his hyperbole, but Mashaba is correct on this.