Small parties wield big power in South Africa's coalition political landscape. Chris Steyn speaks to Move SA President and Jo’burg mayoral candidate Rali Mampeule, ALJAMA-A’s Jo’burg Mayoral candidate Ashley Mama and the African Transformation Movement (ATM) Youth Leader Bafana Tshabalala. They each share their worst experiences of living in Johannesburg, their visions of saving the city, and their desire for cooperation - instead of hostility - between parties. “All politicians should be like bishops and pastors, that their whole sole aim is to make sure that they preach the word of God. I get very surprised when politicians go and they debate and they hate each other. And I ask myself, when do they have the time to go on the ground and actually help the people that need the help”, Mampeule says. Tshabalala adds that coalition negotiations and agreements should not have at its centre “who gets to benefit from the benefits of Blue Lights”, but about ensuring that the city works and ensuring that the services are delivered to the people. “It should not matter who gets to deliver those services”. Meanwhile, Mama urges citizens to be more active, because “it does not help you to lament the situation. Because if you keep leaving the situation currently as it is, there will be a revolt that we won't be able to control.”.Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Chris Steyn (00:01.42)Small parties wield big power in South Africa's coalition political landscape. I welcome Move SA President and Jo’burg mayoral candidate Rali Mampeule, ALJAMA-A’s Joburg Mayoral candidate Ashley Mama and the African Transformation Movement's (ATM) Youth Leader Bafana Tshabalala.Rali Mampeule (00:22.487)Good morning. Thank you very much.Ashley Mama ALJAMA-A (00:23.141)Thank you for having us on your platform.Chris Steyn (00:27.296)You are welcome. Before we enter into a mini debate, I have a question. What has been the worst experience for each of you, personally, of living in Johannesburg? May I start with you, Mr Mampeule?Rali Mampeule (00:43.559)I think one of the worst things I've ever seen is really people who I went to school with going to visit a township on a Wednesday, 12 o'clock, and seeing some of the friends that I grew up with holding a beer and sitting in a crate with no job during the August dust. And that just made me aware that our case in the city of Johannesburg is getting worse than we thought it is. And as you look around, you see a lot of young people who are unemployed, who have no hope, who are now into drugs, who are now committing suicide and really battling with mental health in terms of moving forward with their lives. And that also just made me aware of the fact that what I always say that with this whole 68 % of South Africans not having a second surname of their father, you actually see the impact in real life. And that just… It hurts. And I think that's part and parcel of what we're saying as the MOVE SA to say that politics is not really about the individuals. It's really about the people on the ground. And I get very surprised when politicians go and they debate and they hate each other. And I ask myself, when do they have the time to go on the ground and actually help the people that need the help?Chris Steyn (02:14.07)What about you, Mr. Mama?Ashley Mama ALJAMA-A (02:17.065)I don't know, Chris, I think I'll concur with my colleague, but I'm saying, one: the fact that the city has lost all credibility, it's infrastructure has deteriorated, there's broken dreams within the townships as well, and informal settlements. And actually overall the citizens are depleted. They don't have hope, they don't believe, and which we understand because there's no political will from those who are currently in power to change the city around, to restore dignity, to rebuild the city. I mean people must understand that Johannesburg is one of the biggest cities in the world. We are the biggest city definitely economically through Africa. And if this great city is not functioning, nothing functions across the province and the country and it impacts Africa as a whole for us when we were campaigning.I think the state of the city is terrible and also that people are completely hopeless. It's a very sad state of affairs, that our leaders have put us in this situation where they don't believe in the country anymore. Patriotism has gone out the window, unemployment has skyrocketed and Johannesburg truly needs to drive the economic agenda because people can't eat potholes. Chris Steyn (05:36.371)What about you, Mr. Tshabalala?Bafana Tshabalala (ATM) (05:55.5)A world class African city and yet you can't even walk in Johannesburg CBD because it's not safe. I think that is telling and it's the reality of our crisis in the city. But also the fact that these things are known. It's not like it's surprising because we know that you go to, for example, Hillbrow, we know that there are drug dens there, but none of the law enforcement agencies take it upon themselves to ensure that they make the city safe. Big businesses are leaving the city because no one wants to have their offices in Johannesburg because it's not safe. But more and above that is that you leave that crisis as angry as you are and you drive home and you hit a pothole, which further exacerbates your anger because we pay for services, we have a government in place, we should be having Johannesburg that is working, but we do not have Johannesburg that is working. And to show that it's even deteriorating…at some point it was said that services are rendered only in suburban areas and not the township. But now we are all the same because even the suburban people are complaining as much as the township people are complaining about services. This goes to show that the city is no longer working for its citizens. It goes to show that Johannesburg is not working and it needs a government that can make it work.Chris Steyn (07:11.926)Mr. Rampuele, how would you like to go about making it work for the citizens of Johannesburg, the long suffering citizens of Johannesburg?Rali Mampeule (07:24.478)Yes, I think the first thing is to, you know, most of the challenges that we're all speaking about really come from economic hardships. The economic hardships that our people faced during Apartheid, the hardship and the hopes that were dropped just somewhere in the middle post-1994. In 1994, all of us were queuing, we were voting and we were quite excited and things were looking like South Africa, the rainbow that we all know, the favourite of the world with Nelson Mandela behind us. And somewhere, somewhere, somehow, someone dropped the ball. I don't know if it's the young generation of the tenders, the young generations of the water tank mafias. I'm not sure what happened, but somebody dropped the ball. The challenge that we're going to have to deal with is to, first of all, what we will do is to make sure that we...create an environment for entrepreneurship, to be able to create jobs for our people so that we can improve the economic situation. And the first thing that we're going to do is to say that the people that are owed money by one, by the city, that are genuinely owed and are not tenderpreneurs that did illegal things, but that young lady who supplied water and she borrowed money from her father-in-law…Rali Mampeule (08:49.532)…during a conference of the city and the city is not paying her the money six, seven months later…entrepreneurs like that who have provided genuine service to the city of Johannesburg and they're not being paid. And behind every entrepreneur that is not paid, it's a family that is divorcing. It's a family that a child has been suspended from school. It's a family that is keeps on creating and increasing the 68%Rali Mampeule (09:17.391)You know, what I was speaking about earlier on of saying that most of our people, some of us don't have fathers because of the economic situationSo one of the first things we'll do is to get all the CEOs of all the entities in the city to pay the money that is owed to entrepreneurs so that we can create an environment for business so that the business can create jobs. The second part is to just make sure that we also bring our people closer to where they work. I mean, one of the things that is a challenge that…Rali Mampeule (09:46.895)…we need to start working on making sure that we cut down on the 500,000 people that are staying in informal settlements. 350 of what we call informal settlements. We've been corrected actually to say that our people are actually now staying there. It's actually no longer an informal settlement. The word informal settlement is more on the municipal point of view, but we want to make sure that we can deal with the economic situation immediately by creating jobs and making sure that entrepreneurs are able to work in a great environment. Secondly, we want to make sure that there's good governance. So will fire the people that are not doing the job, the people that are not approving developments and allowing money to be returned back to Treasury unspent while there's an auntie, there's a mother who doesn't have a home, but money gets returned back. So those types of people will be fired. But also we are then saying that we will then obviously address the issue of housing and make sure that the housing...Rali Mampeule (10:42.381)…that we provide to our people, it's got electricity that works, it's got water that can actually be there. You can go there without having a puncture with potholes. And that is closer to where you stay and work. So that's probably one of the first few things that we'll definitely look at to unlock the value that is sitting there for entrepreneurs and people that are owed by the city.Chris Steyn (11:13.312)Mr Mama, how would you respond to Mr Mampeule's vision for Johannesburg?Ashley Mama ALJAMA-A (11:44.704)So the vision for Johannesburg, I always reference this, that it needs political will to rebuild this great city, to restore its dignity. Ours is very simple. We believe that for economic empowerment, the city should work for its residents. I think we also take as much as the system was wrong, but there's something that the National Party did right. It came with political will. And it was not talking about potholes and infrastructure. It spoke about developing the poor, who were the poor of the poorest at the time in 1948. And they created State-owned entities and the city started working for them, which now we can see that the poor are one of the richest tribes in the world globally now from a white people's perspective. So for us, we want to take from that and say, let's build equality across all races and make the city work for everyone across colour, creed and communities. We are saying that we want to unbundle the city. We want to ensure that red tape is cut. People, the community should be able to do right for, they should be able to maintain their own communities. So the city, we want to create special economic zones, firstly, across all the regions. And then secondly, we must cut the red tape. Thirdly, we must ensure that the EPWP programme works in order to upscale so that we can insource those workers. So when we say upscale, we mean that not only are we going to educate them with accredited courses, but they will be insourced and become artisans that will be able to ensure that the city of Johannesburg works. When it comes to smaller businesses with the small...special economic zones, they must maintain the infrastructure. So the security must come from a local company. The patrol person who's going to do it, the construction firm must come from the locals that are from the affected ward or the affected zone region. So that you can hold people accountable so that they don't loot and abuse the city. Because if you know who's doing the patrols, if you know who's doing the roads, if you know who's doing the maintenance of the substation…Ashley Mama ALJAMA-A (14:01.095)…or the power station, you would be able to hold that person to account. But more importantly, we want to make the city more transparent and turn it into a more economical and developmental agenda. Because it's so sad now, all political parties are talking about is potholes, water, and those are the basics. There's 40,000 people that are employed that we should hold to account with your taxpayers' money. We should really hold these people to account. I mean, we know that we were discussing this with Rali the other day that we have ghost employees. We have these public servants who are public servants. They should serve the public, not us serving them because now this entitlement attitude of the public servants and the political parties that are currently in charge, it's terrible. South Africa has created these people to be demigods. Do you know that some of these people and some CEOs within the city earn close to five million in per annum. And you ask yourself, but why is service delivery not done? If we have a workforce like that, why is service delivery not done? One of the first things we want to do is just to ensure that we go through who's been employed, why have they been employed? Do they have the skillsets to service the city? And we will create one mayoral dashboard or app where everyone can access the services of the city. So if you've reported a for patrol, your community should know that, okay, Chris has reported a patrol. This is the public servant who's supposed to handle this. And this is where it is escalated and it must be transparent. So tenders must be transparent. Coalition agreements must be transparent. You should know the public servants that are working for you as residents of Johannesburg. So let me pause there because I get very passionate about this thing.Yeah, so the vision for the city is to make it more transparent, more economically viable, to ensure that we release, we make the city into a developmental city, not just talking about pot holes. People can’t eat potholes and things. That should be the basics. It should be done already with your taxpayers, money which the city is doing. So let me pause there. Thank you.Chris Steyn (16:15.468)Thank you very much. And you, Mr. Tshabalala, what is your vision? How would you like to respond to Mr. Mama and Mr. Mampeule?Bafana Tshabalala (ATM) (16:24.487)So our vision is simple, get Johannesburg to work. We have, for example, city entities to provide basic services and yet we're still battling with providing those basic services. So it speaks to the issue of accountability to say there is someone employed somewhere to provide a service and they're not providing it and yet they still keep their job. So as the ATM we are seeing, the first thing that we need to do is revamp and re-haul the city entities because we have Johannesburg Road Agency. So we shouldn't be suffering from portals. We have Rand Water. We shouldn't be suffering from the issue of getting water. We have the City Power. We shouldn't be suffering from the issues of electricity. So that is the first thing that we're going to do is to say, firstly, look at those entities, look at their board members and also look at the employees themselves and also look at the accountability and consequence management within those entities so that they can provide services to the people.But also we are seeing the city centre: return the city's offices back into the Metro Centre so that we have a one-stop shop for everyone. So when you want to access services of the city, you will find them in the Metro Centre. But what happens when you close Metro Centre is that you predispose that building to being hijacked, which further is a bait to the situation that we have in Johannesburg. So we are saying we must return all those hijacked buildings because they have criminality. And also the reason why the city centre is not safe. Make the city centre safe. Make sure that we have economic activities and ensure that businesses come back into the city and they invest in the city and also not move away from the city. You go to your townships, they have township development. We have budgets that are returned to National Treasury because they were not utilised. And when you look at our city, you see that we definitely needed that money. So we are seeing the Public Finance Management Act, Municipal Finance Management Act does not allow for us to return money that is not utilised. If money has been allocated for development, money must be utilised and it must be made…Bafana Tshabalala (ATM) (18:30.311)…such that everyone can actually see that this man did one two three because if you return for example two billion that was meant for township development, you are in fact saying the townships are well developed such that we do not need that money again and that is not reality. Reality is that we need that money that the Treasury allocates to us and we need to ensure that if money is returned for whatever reason there must be consequence management unless of course we can all agree that we do not need that money, which is not reality. So that is what as the ATM we are saying to rebuild the city center, rebuild the business confidence into the city and then ensure that services are delivered. Because even if you have businesses in the city, if you can't provide basic services, especially for SMMEs, if I have a business and we do not have electricity and we must rely on the generator, it's costing me more to run this business in the city. I'd rather have this business operating somewhere else. So, if you have the city that is working, you ensure that business remains in the city. You have SMMEs functioning because SMMEs have proven that they are job creators in the main. So we must ensure that we support those SMMEs. But we also say we can't have tenders less than 10 million being given to big corporates when they can be given to SMMEs and create jobs within the city.Chris Steyn (19:52.845)Now we've seen the big political parties attack one another. There's been such war talk as they fight it out for votes. But I sense that the smaller parties are keen to join hands and stand together. What is your view of that, Mr Mampeule?Rali Mampeule (24:15.562)I think you're quite correct. I mean, we we really get surprised when we see a big political party fight, especially now that ourselves as a new entrance into politics, you know, when we go on the ground to Diepsloot, to other places and you see how people are suffering, and you ask yourself when do people have time to go hire somebody to just take on another politician? All politicians should be like bishops and pastors, that their whole sole aim is to make sure that they preach the word of God. And in politics, we should all be coming in to say that we are coming to save us and help, especially the disadvantaged individual people, and make sure that we can be able to better our country economically and make sure there's accountability. So I think from the different debates that I've been attending since we now are campaigning to become the mayor of Johannesburg as Move SA, we are saying that we should be able to work with politicians that are not here as a career, but also to say they are here to serve the people. It is actually like a calling. So we look forward to connecting with new entrants. And you know, one of the challenges that creates there is that, you know, only 17% of South Africans trust politicians. Business is actually more trusted than government. And we say we're coming in as entrepreneurs to see what skills we can share with our actual politicians? We're not here to take their jobs because we don't see politics as a job. We see politics as something that should be servicing the people. And we feel we've got the skills. We have built shopping centres. We have built and delivered 68,000 land housing opportunities. We have connected more than 500,000 households with fast Internet. And we've changed people's lives. So we feel that, at this point in time, our country is at a stage where it lacks a sense of urgency. We're of the view that the current politicians have no sense of urgency and don't have the understanding of exactly what needs to happen. And we are trying to bring the skills and we're seeing a lot of young people and new entrants with different skills entering the space. You can see even with the group of young people that we're having here, most of us are chatting about how we can fix South Africa.Rali Mampeule (26:37.924)And how can we all bring our different expertise to make South Africa the and the city of Johannesburg the world class city that it really deserved to be? And I think that's going to happen. and we look forward to being part and parcel of implementing that, Chris.Chris Steyn (26:57.12)And you, Mr Tshabala, how do you feel about joining forces with other smaller and newer parties?Bafana Tshabalala (ATM) (26:56.297)Look, if our concerns are genuine and our servitude is for the people of the city of Johannesburg, it should not matter who gets to deliver those services, but ours is to say people must be serviced. So we must understand that we must come together…Bafana Tshabalala (ATM) (27:24.914)….because absolute power corrupts. So we need to work together to ensure that the citizens of the city are prioritised. If in our coalition agreement, if in our negotiations, we at the centre of all those negotiations is not who gets to benefit from the benefits of Blue Lights, for example, but if in our centre of those conversations is the citizens being serviced, then we will understand fundamentally that it's about us coming together, ensuring that the city works and ensuring that the services are delivered to the people. It should not matter who gets to deliver those services, but what matters is that we should get the journeys back working again.Chris Steyn (29:23.926)Mr. Mama, we've been talking about how big parties have been fighting each other while the smaller parties seem to want to join hands. How do you feel about that?Ashley Mama ALJAMA-A (29:39.399)I think the smaller parties, one of the great things about it is that it has more qualitative and visionary leadership, and ideas to want to take the country forward. These are like for example, I'm an internationally awarded businessman, I've done well in business. You've got Rali who's an activist and has done very well in business, extremely well actually, Rali. You have these types of people coming from different sectors of society who are saying we are tired of complaining, we don't want to entertain this thing anymore. Hence why our view as ALJAMA-A is always to say, please be more active as citizens, because it does not help you to lament the situation. Because if you keep leaving the situation currently as it is, there will be a revolt that we won't be able to control. And because it's untenable to where South Africa is currently. It's not sustainable for everyone. And hence why we urge people to start looking at the smaller parties to say, what are they saying really? And if you look across all smaller parties, they actually speak more towards the people and their issues. And they're also going more to a further extent to say that we should not only just be talking about potholes, guys. Like there's public service that we've paying for…So they've got a more progressive agenda. The bigger parties are more about looting. It's their people who are in the city, as we would know. This is why we have a collapse. I mean, you look at one of the bigger parties, the Constitutional Court judgment in the city of Cape Town has said that the Constitutional Court has found them guilty of perpetuating Apartheid, spatial planning, you know, a lack of service delivery for certain groups of people. I mean you look at these things and you just look at old granny spinning a car and what is that gonna assist the people of Johannesburg with? So these big parties they've punished the people too much. It's time now that our citizens start listening to other political parties because I don't see why citizens would have a lack of options now because…Ashley Mama ALJAMA-A (31:58.107)…you should vote for people who are really, really, really looking forward, who are patriots. Because the two biggest parties are the reason we are in a state that we're in with no direction. If they fail to collect revenue, they won't go. They're not solution oriented. They're just gonna punish the citizens because they just raise your rates and taxes. That's all they know how to do and put us in a worse state when there is no economy currently functioning. SoYeah, let me pause it there. But there's a lot I can say because Johannesburg is a highly complex city. But we are saying and we urge all residents, start listening to your ATMs, your Move SA’s, your ALJAMA-As, listen to what they have to say instead of listening to fiestas of, you know, spinning cars and all these funny theatrics which have collapsed the city…Ashley Mama ALJAMA-A (32:51.427)of Cape Town itself. Even now they want to collapse it here. So there's many parties that are foolish in general in their outlook. So please start looking at the smaller parties and hear what they have to say. I think this is the greatest thing about democracy that there's options down. You know. So I'll pause there. Thank you so much.Chris Steyn (33:11.82)Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining me today on BizNews. I'm Chris Steyn..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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