When Herman Mashaba stood as a candidate for Mayor of Johannesburg last November, I wondered whether that was wise. Had the founder of ActionSA actually won, he would have been taken away from the far more important challenge of the 2024 National Election. So last week’s news that he had resigned as a councillor was no surprise. There are bigger fish to fry.
Among them, finding provincial party leaders – like yesterday’s coup with Athol Trollip in the Eastern Cape. We caught up last night, immediately after Mashaba arrived home. Despite a long day, Mashaba was energised, chatting for 20 minutes after our interview had ended (click here to hear it). He is on purpose. And his objective is to eject the ANC from national power.
Mashaba is a gifted entrepreneur who together with wife Connie, overcame almost impossible odds to build a substantial business. ActionSA is increasingly looking like a rinse and repeat. What surprises me is how few business executives have processed the likelihood that in just two years the ANC will no longer be setting the national agenda. If they truly grasped the socialists would be ejected, SA’s fixed investment would already be rocketing.
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Comment from BizNews community member Colin Braude:
Why is it that so many “opposition” editors in SA favour Great White Hope parties and politicians? Someone or a party that can win “them” over and expel the ANC.
Despite UDM, Cope, Agang, Good, etc all having mushroomed and faded.
Perhaps it is the rarefied air of the editorial room or putting hope over reality? Or some, having studied in the Humanities, definitely have a woke/left/Marxist tinge, perhaps coupled with a sneaking desire to be Saul Alinsky.
It certainly is a lack of understanding of How Politics Works.
Firstly there is the “hearts and minds” thing, heavily linked to “blood is thicker than water”. Essentially politics is tribal. Way back in 1980 Cynthia H. Enloe (an academic) published Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies in which she demonstrated that top appointments in the British army favoured English over Scottish, Welsh or Irish officers.
If you haven’t read it The Righteous Mind by Harvard prof Jonathan Haidt (rigorously researched) explains a great deal.
You make publishing a newsletter look so easy, like anyone with a computer, fax and modem can be a publisher.
When I began as Internal Auditor at Wits I was shocked to learn — after being at a school where the admin staff comprised the headmaster, his secretary and some groundsmen — that it had as many “support” people as academics. Tip of the iceberg syndrome.
Political parties are also immensely complex and complicated to run: comparing news stories about the ANC and DA including unpaid salaries, failure to submit candidate lists, internal disputes resulting in court cases, selection by assassination, etc, one can begin to appreciate this. Which is why politicians and political parties are globally obsessed with fund-raising.
Despite their noble intentions, it is unfortunate that the mushroom parties lack resources, but that is the realpolitiek.
Getting on to personalities, while autocracy often accompanies “self-made men” —”my way or the highway” — it may even be an asset for start-up entrepreneurs (Steve Jobs is the holotype) it is a liability in politics, especially in a “cat-herding” party like the DA. Both Herman and Athol are extreme autocrats. Herman left the DA because of several internal challenges to his EFF-lite administration (Gareth van Onselen wrote a pertinent column) while Athol was surprised that grassroots DA councillors, lacking a hearing channel, used pre-elections public meetings to raise issues. This must affect ActionSA and its professed aim of unseating the ANC (despicable and toxic as the latter are, negative politics seldom works); it has not held its first congress and already Herman is expelling dissident members.
Regards.