RW Johnson: What the heck happened to Herman Mashaba?

Herman Mashaba's decision to overthrow Tshwane's DA-led coalition has sparked widespread confusion and concern. Many believe Mayor Cilliers Brink was successfully restoring the city after years of ANC mismanagement. Mashaba's move, which aligns with ANC and EFF interests, contradicts his previous stance and threatens Action SA's future. This could alienate both his party's supporters and financial backers, likely resulting in severe repercussions in the 2026 elections, further diminishing Action SA's influence..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 at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..By R.W. Johnson.Herman Mashaba's decision to overthrow the DA-led coalition in Tshwane goes against the almost universal opinion that Mayor Cilliers Brink has restored order to the capital city .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Mashaba was a well-known businessman who had avoided all political involvement until May 2014 when he joined the DA which, it seems clear, had espied Mashaba as a promising mayoral candidate for the 2016 municipal elections. Sure enough in December 2015 he accepted the DA's nomination as its candidate for mayor of Johannesburg. When, in August 2016, the DA managed to push the ANC below the 50% line, Mashaba reached out to the EFF, suggesting a DA-EFF coalition government. The EFF declined the offer but agreed to vote for Mashaba as mayor..This was a taste of what was to come. Mashaba's links with the DA were very slight – in effect the party had started him at the top in the same way that it did with all too many black politicians. Inevitably, they concluded that this was due to their overwhelming merit and took it very ill when they were subjected to criticism – let alone discipline, though their sheer inexperience guaranteed that they would make many mistakes. Suffice it to say that by the time of the national elections in May 2019 Mashaba was on poor terms with the Johannesburg DA and on rather better terms with the EFF. .The 2019 elections were a grave disappointment for the DA which lost ground after many elections in which it had gained ground every time. A party inquiry concluded – inevitably – that Mmusi Maimane's leadership had been a fault. This was not a difficult decision. Maimane's cavalier dismissiveness towards Afrikaners had cost the party dearly and even some of those who worked in Maimane's office were deeply alienated. Mashaba, however, took it ill that the party should thus dismiss its first black leader and resigned from the DA in October 2019. In fact the party had concluded that opportunistic alliances with the EFF were a bad mistake and it set its face against any such mesalliances in the future, a decision which clearly cut across Mashaba's preferred line of action. In retrospect, indeed, the DA concluded that Mashaba's mayoralty of Johannesburg was an experiment it did not wish to repeat..Read more: BizNews Briefing Ep 2: Kokkie Kooyman, Frans Cronje keynote, Mashaba on Tshwane, AI and more.In 2020 Mashaba founded Action SA, drawing in a number of DA dissidents, and in the 2021 municipal elections the party elected 90 councillors around the country, taking 2.34% of the vote. This was something of a disappointment, especially since 44 of those councillors were elected in Jo'burg (out of 270), simultaneously making it clear that Mashaba's appeal was still largely confined to Gauteng but that even there he was a long way from winning any sort of majority..Then came the 2024 national elections. Mashaba's experience of just how ruinous ANC corruption had been to the city of Johannesburg had led him to declare that he would never, under any circumstances, ally himself with the ANC. This made it fairly inevitable that Action SA would be among the parties that joined John Steenhuisen's "Moonshot Pact", an attempt to generate a broad anti-ANC front. At this point Mashaba was talking confidently of winning 10% of the vote but the reality was brutally short of that: only the DA won a significant share of the vote and Action SA slumped to 1.19%. .This killed off any hope of the anti-ANC front becoming a serious player and the ANC's simultaneous collapse to only 40.2% of the vote led to the formation of the GNU, with the DA becoming the ANC's principal coalition partner. The DA's chief rationale for this was the necessity of avoiding an ANC-EFF-MK coalition – an option which both the DA and Ramaphosa judged to be ruinous..However, the election left Mashaba in a furious state. Action SA's modest result in the 2021 municipal elections had been put down to the fact that the party was only a year old and hadn't had time to build a proper organisation. But the 2024 result saw the party's vote fall by almost half and made it clear that Mashaba's political venture was on the brink of collapse. Just as with Patricia De Lille, Mamphela Ramphele and Mmusi Maimane, Mashaba had bet on his own personality being sufficiently famous and popular to carry Action SA – and it wasn't enough..Mashaba had some difficulty believing that. Just as De Lille had commanded the booming city of Cape Town and Mmusi Maimane had led the DA, so Mashaba's career had started at the top, being boss of South Africa's largest and richest city. It was all too easy for each of these people to forget that they owed their position entirely to the DA's ill-judged generosity and not to their intrinsic power of personality. Maimane, too, had way-overestimated his appeal, talking of getting 5% of the vote. (He got 0.41%). .Read more: Herman Mashaba: Negotiations for the soul of SA's capital….And, like all the small parties created by dissidents from the DA, Action SA has spent most of its time attacking the DA – because, of course, it has few real policy differences from the DA, and it knows that the DA electorate provides the biggest pool of potential support for such parties. The result is that if and when Mashaba feels unhappy about his situation, he tends naturally to blame the DA..And Mashaba's situation following the election was an extremely unhappy one. On the one hand Action SA had refused to join the GNU and said it would be the leading voice of opposition. Then, however, realising that Action SA had only six seats against the EFF's 39 and MK's 58 and that this made it impossible for Action SA to play a major role in opposition, Mashaba, despite having headed the Action SA list, decided not to take up a seat in Parliament. The brutal truth was that Action SA was now only the 8th biggest party and just didn't matter very much. It would have been wiser for Mashaba to review some of his own past decisions which had led him to this impasse, but he decided instead to do the most damaging thing he could to the DA – evict the DA-led administration from Tshwane. .This involved a volte face on his commitment never to work with the ANC. Instead Mashaba hopes to put together a mainly ANC-EFF administration to run Tshwane under a somewhat nominal Action SA mayor. This is likely to be a suicidal move. The current administration of Cilliers Brink has made great strides towards getting Tshwane to work as it should again. The public dismay at Mashaba's move is real and unfeigned. Not only the DA but several of the minor parties and even many Action SA voters are likely to punish Action SA for this in the 2026 municipal elections. If, as seems likely, the party then loses even the small ground it held in the previous municipal elections, it will have reached the end of the road and is likely to be abandoned by its former backers. People think that Mashaba alone pays for everything in Action SA but this is not true: the party has received many millions of Rands from the Oppenheimer family and the Israeli-South African businessman, Martin Moshal. Mashaba's decision to damage the liberal cause in South Africa, essentially out of personal pique, is unlikely to have their support..The history which men like Maimane and Mashaba ignore at their peril is that in South Africa successful parties normally operate and thrive within one of the country's major political traditions. The Congress tradition which lasted all the way through apartheid and which has been weakened only by decades of ANC corruption, is what has nourished the ANC. There is a still powerful Afrikaner nationalist tradition running all the way back to the Anglo-Boer wars. The National Party flourished within that tradition until apartheid's self-immolation but the tradition lives on not only in the Freedom Front + but in Solidarity and Afriforum. Finally, there is the liberal tradition (greatly supplemented by the missionary tradition) within which the DA sits. South African politics has never been kindly to men or women who thought they could break away from those structures and base their appeal solely on their fame and personality. But, human vanity being what it is, this lesson has to be learnt afresh in each generation..Read also:.Mashaba's ultimatum to the ANC: ActionSA Speaker – or no dealPragmatic Mashaba on ANC deal: We're rescuing Joburg from political power-mongeringMashaba doubles down on 'Rainbow Nation' dream of SA overcoming race-based politics

RW Johnson: What the heck happened to Herman Mashaba?

Related Stories

Cathy Buckle: Zimbabwe buries democracy in plain sight

Chris Hattingh: South Africa does not have the luxury to make mistakes

The Economist: America didn't just win AI. It owns the keys.

The DA doesn't fear the ANC. It should fear what comes next