The Accidental Mayor. Michael Beaumont
into because I believed so much in the potential of our country as defined in that magical moment in 1994, and I had watched the ruling party tarnish that moment year after year with their rampant corruption, failed governments and inability to unleash the potential inherent within the South African spirit.
I knew I needed people around me to assist in this mammoth task, none more so than a chief of staff. Your first appointment as a leader of government is your chief of staff, and for good reason. It is a critical position; the right choice will advance your agenda, while the wrong choice will cripple it.
Appointing Michael Beaumont as my chief of staff was one of the better decisions I made as mayor of Johannesburg. Together, along with the team we assembled, we worked tirelessly to advance an agenda of change that would stop corruption, deliver services and create jobs. Together, we waged battle against the forces that worked against every prospect of our success.
In the process, we forged a bond in a way that only happens when two people work closely together against impossible odds and begin to achieve great feats.
This is why there is no one better than Michael to tell this story.
HERMAN MASHABA
JOHANNESBURG, 2020
On Monday 21 October 2019, Mayor Herman Mashaba walked into a packed press conference in the Johannesburg Metro Centre. Every media house was present. The buzz in the room quickly faded, to be replaced by the sound of camera shutters snapping away furiously.
Mashaba delivered an emotional speech, announcing his resignation from the Democratic Alliance (DA) and, consequently, the mayoralty of Johannesburg. Very few people would have known Mashaba well enough to recognise the combination of hurt, frustration and resoluteness in his words. He recounted how the party he had represented had changed, and how it had become the biggest obstacle to his work of transforming Johannesburg.
Immediately afterwards, Mashaba was joined at the podium by Mmusi Maimane, the leader of the DA. ‘You are my hero,’ Maimane said to him.
At the time of Mashaba’s announcement, his approval rating stood at almost 70 per cent and calls for him not to resign trended on social media for 24 hours straight.
As to how Mashaba got to this point, three years and two months after being elected as an unlikely mayor of Johannesburg – now therein lies the story.
The 2016 local government elections were a watershed in South African politics. At the time, no opposition party held power in any of the country’s metropolitan municipalities outside of the Western Cape, where the Democratic Alliance governed the City of Cape Town as well as the province. But the ruling African National Congress (ANC) had become mired in scandal as allegations emerged during the first half of 2016 about corruption and state capture involving President Jacob Zuma, senior ANC politicians and the now-infamous Gupta family. Seeing their opportunity, the opposition set its sights on Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay.
The DA realised the importance of choosing the right person to stand as their mayoral candidate in the City of Johannesburg. It was going to require someone special to deliver that crucial municipality. Various names had been bandied about, but the one that stood out was Herman Mashaba. Through his business achievements, Herman Mashaba was already a brand.
Mashaba was not a politician. His entry into politics came late, at the age of 55, when he realised that being an armchair critic of the ANC’s failure wasn’t going to change anything.
He had always been open about his relationship with the ANC in the early days of democracy. He had thought a peaceful transition would be impossible and was overwhelmed by the miraculous moment of 1994. He believed there would be an explosion of entrepreneurship and growth in South Africa. How could there not, when the crippling oppression of apartheid had been lifted? Instead he witnessed a culture of patronage and government dependency set in. Rather than a thriving small-business sector, hand-selected tenderpreneurs benefited while the majority of entrepreneurs languished in a sea of red tape and bureaucracy, courtesy of a government beholden to organised labour in exchange for political support.
His hopes for the country were gradually replaced by the realities of HIV/AIDs denialism, quiet diplomacy with Zimbabwe, cadre deployment and rampant corruption. In the business circles in which he operated, Mashaba witnessed how the practices of tenderpreneurship, kickbacks and the selective and narrow application of black economic empowerment (BEE) took place at the expense of broad empowerment.
He publicly joined the DA in 2014, following a commitment to do so if the ANC was not brought under 60 per cent in those elections. He also wanted to show black South Africans that, in a democracy, loyalty to the ANC must not be unconditional and that a failing government must be replaced by another to be held similarly accountable by the people.
Born in 1959 in the small rural village of GaRamotse, Hammanskraal, in the north of Pretoria, Mashaba was one of six children. His father passed away when he was two, and his mother worked as a domestic worker in Johannesburg. He and his sisters were left to fend for themselves, often having to steal firewood and water to survive.
Before becoming mayor, Mashaba had worked only two salaried jobs in his life. He worked for seven months at a Spar distribution centre in Pretoria, and for 23 months at Motani Industries.
He met his wife, Connie, in 1978, when he and his friends visited a nearby girls’ school that was hosting a beauty contest. Connie won the contest, and she caught his eye. Mashaba felt that if he was to be successful in business he needed to settle down and get married. He and Connie tied the knot four years later.
From there, Herman and Connie Mashaba started the hair-care product range, Black Like Me. He secured a loan of R30 000 from Walter Dube, a pioneering industrialist in the black community, and partnered with a white Afrikaner from Boksburg named Johan Kriel. Over the years this partnership became a friendship and the Mashabas and their children would visit the Kriels’ farm, much to the ire of their neighbours in the late 1980s. Out of the boot of his blue 1982 Toyota Corolla, a business empire was built in the darkest days of apartheid oppression. As a testament to Mashaba’s enduring will to succeed, that car had to be serviced every month because of the mileage it racked up for the business. It paid off, and by 1997, when they sold Black Like Me, Herman and Connie Mashaba had built it into the foremost brand in black hair-care in South Africa.
Mashaba served as the chairperson of both the Free Market Foundation and the Institute of Directors in Southern Africa. He successfully tackled organised labour, challenging their efforts to extend collective agreements that would have hampered the growth of small businesses.
It took some convincing and much arm-twisting by DA stalwarts such as Mike Moriarty, John Moodey, Mmusi Maimane and Helen Zille to get Mashaba to stand as mayor. In fact, it bordered on coercion at times. So reluctant was he that he boarded a plane to the United States, at his own expense, to convince Lindiwe Mazibuko to stand as the party’s mayoral candidate. She declined, and Mashaba was forced to return home facing the prospect of a thoroughly undesirable job. There were two factors that ultimately convinced him to stand. The first was his strong sense of patriotism, in which the DA found their leverage. The second, ironically, was President Jacob Zuma.
On 9 December 2015, Zuma fired his respected minister of finance, Nhlanhla Nene. Apparently Nene wasn’t backing the president’s plans for a R1-trillion nuclear deal, which was shrouded with the familiar dark clouds of corruption. In Nene’s place, Zuma appointed Des van Rooyen, whose only claim to fame was being a failed mayor of an obscure West Rand municipality in Gauteng. Within 48 hours