The Accidental Mayor. Michael Beaumont
rehabilitation services out of our clinics.
Mashaba was proud when he met a family in Soweto that had benefited from this service. The son was a drug addict and the family had endured all the associated hardships. They would come home to find he had sold their possessions to get his next fix, and they had become the pariahs of their neighbourhood. With the advent of the drug rehabilitation services, the son began to get better and returned to school, and the life of the entire family improved dramatically. The father described the initiative as a godsend. Mashaba offered to finance the son’s efforts to matriculate and proceed to university. As always, he was strong on the requirement that he would continue to finance the son’s education provided his grades reflected a good work ethic.
Mashaba also had the vision to launch the city’s first volunteer campaign. A Re Sebetseng, which is a Sotho term meaning ‘let’s work’, was modelled on the Rwandan Umuganda Day, which was initiated after the horrific genocide of the mid-1990s. On the last Saturday of every month in Rwanda, every citizen, from the lowliest member of society to the president, participates in programmes to better their community and surroundings, including street sweeping, tree planting and repairing public buildings. It’s the law, so participation is not a problem, and wherever you go in Rwanda today, whether Kigali or a rural village, it is clean. More importantly, given its appalling history of neighbour killing neighbour, some regard Rwanda today as one of the most successful African countries with the highest levels of social cohesion.
Mashaba launched A Re Sebetseng in Johannesburg in August 2017. The programme was successful, given that it was not legally mandated, and saw thousands of volunteers engaged in community clean-ups every month. It even had corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Anglo American and Adcock Ingram. A Re Sebetseng was on the verge of being professionalised when we left office. It had been a good amateur production, but one that was on the verge of going pro. There is something to be said for programmes like this that have South Africans working side by side to make their communities and spaces better; for tapping into the spirit of South Africans through volunteerism; and for shifting the extent to which people rely solely on an ineffective or hamstrung government to improve their environment.
It was fascinating in those early days of governing to watch how Mashaba applied himself to the task of turning Johannesburg around. It was clear from the start that his style of leadership informed his business-like approach, and that this approach was key to his success. Where those in government saw a problem that couldn’t be solved, Mashaba saw an opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking. It was invigorating to work alongside him, because we would always have to find a creative way to deliver on his expectations outside of the confines of traditional government thinking.
As Mashaba’s chief of staff, I gained insights into his character, and I came to understand how he managed to succeed in politics as a newcomer, not in spite of it but because of it.
A lot has been written about his rise from abject poverty in the dark days of apartheid to becoming one of South Africa’s most successful businessmen. He built an empire, not just in terms of business, but also in terms of vast networks and experience. His habit of speaking his mind and appearing unpolished in the political sense resulted in many commentators writing him off. I doubt it was the first time people had made that mistake. You must understand that by writing him off, you all but guarantee his stubborn success.
To say that Herman Mashaba is unconventional is an amusing understatement. The team I led in the mayor’s office was conventional, conditioned by years of experience in politics, communications, law, policy and performance management. Those years had institutionalised particular ways of thinking and benchmarking success. There were certain commonly accepted dos and don’ts that we took as unchallengeable truths. Mashaba, however, made it a habit to flip convention on its head, and I think he enjoyed doing it.
Most people look at a system and attempt to work within it to push its boundaries or alter its direction. They do this because it is more comfortable to operate within the known and attempt to influence change, even when the known is flawed. Mashaba is not one of these people. He is a disruptor. He looks at a system and sees how innovation and ingenuity can arise from disturbing the usual order of things. Ordinary and rational people seldom change the world because they see things as they are. It is the disruptors, who see the world as it should be, who often have the greatest impact.
Being a self-professed novice to politics, Mashaba approached the work of public service from a unique perspective. As noted before, politicians do not require advanced training in the ways that bomb disposal technicians, doctors and astronauts do. Politics requires a departure from the status quo, and for political leaders to approach each decision in good faith, with common sense and with the best interests of the people in mind. Common sense, despite its name, is not all that common in politics.
There was no place for political spin or expediency, both of which Mashaba outlawed in his first month in office. Over time we witnessed his approach at work in the city and how it affected decision-making, yielding positive results. This was particularly true in terms of managing relationships with coalition partners and the EFF. He would often disarm people by starting a meeting with the anecdote that he had studied political science at the University of the North for only a few months before the army shut it down. He would then convey to all present that ‘my knowledge of politics is very dangerous’, which, after a moment of stunned silence, would typically lead to laughter.
The next feature of the man that has to be understood is that he was not a career politician. He held no ambitions for higher office in either the DA or in government. He did not view being mayor of Johannesburg as a stepping stone to something greater; rather, he saw it as a privilege. He wanted to rescue South Africa from the ANC and he believed that fixing Johannesburg was the way to do it. He would often say: ‘When Johannesburg works, South Africa works.’ The reality was that he didn’t need the work. After about two weeks serving as mayor, Mashaba walked into my office, rather embarrassed, and asked: ‘Michael, do I get paid for this job?’ I couldn’t help but laugh. Can you imagine a South African politician accepting such responsibility without knowing the answer to that question?
Practically, this meant that Mashaba might have been the first mayor in South Africa who was not beholden to provincial or national government, or even to his own political party. This didn’t endear him to people in the DA and the other spheres of government, who were entirely unaccustomed to being unable to exert control. He was the accidental mayor. He had no aspirations that could be used to manipulate him.
In the run-up to the DA’s elective federal congress in 2017, an idea had begun to do the rounds in party circles, and among the EFF, that Mashaba should stand against Mmusi Maimane for federal leader. Several party members approached him to do so, but he wasn’t interested and batted away the suggestions. About two weeks before the congress, I was with him when he received a call from a prominent party leader who asked him whether it was true that he was standing for internal election. His response, genuinely, was to ask: ‘Is there a federal congress coming up?’
In 2018, party leaders again approached Mashaba, this time to enter the race to be the DA’s premier candidate for Gauteng in 2019. At the time he was indisputably the person with the highest name recognition and favourability in the province, and any prospect of taking Gauteng from the ANC would have been improved with Mashaba as the candidate. He flatly refused, saying that he had made a commitment to the people of Johannesburg and that they required a full-time, undistracted mayor. End of conversation.
In a similar vein and critical to Mashaba’s long and successful business career, and later his political career, was a firm belief that to succeed you can never be indebted. Once you owed someone something, you were in their pocket and beholden to them. It was a principle he applied every day as mayor of Johannesburg, where people were constantly attempting to ‘capture’ him in order to have him in their debt. Often, a meeting would finish and Mashaba would turn to me or one of our team and say: ‘Never