The Accidental Mayor. Michael Beaumont
wiped off the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Most of the losses were from pension funds. When public pressure mounted against Van Rooyen’s appointment, Zuma was forced to replace him, naming old hand Pravin Gordhan as his successor. South Africans sat bewildered by the fact that we’d had three different finance ministers within four days.
Incensed by Zuma’s actions, Mashaba threw his hat into the ring to be the DA’s mayoral candidate in Johannesburg. His greatest cause in life was now to unseat the ANC.
On Saturday 16 January 2016, after the DA’s electoral college, Mashaba was announced as their mayoral candidate for Johannesburg. On that same day, he resigned from his many business interests.
The DA’s campaign for the local government elections was already well under way when the mayoral candidates were announced. I was in charge of the campaign in Gauteng, overseeing a massive operation, coordinating 10 municipal campaigns run with thousands of volunteers. I had been managing provincial campaigns in the DA since 2009, starting in KwaZulu-Natal and then in Gauteng from 2011.
We knew it was going to be close, especially in Tshwane, Johannesburg and Mogale City in the West Rand. The ruling ANC’s support base had been rendered apathetic by the crippling years of the Zuma era, and the ANC metro governments had become detached, complacent and ineffective.
This was also the first election in which a new party had not entered the electoral race, enjoying all the Cinderella-type media coverage that goes with it. In 2009 it was the Congress of the People (COPE), which so-called experts forecast to become the future official opposition. In 2011, in KwaZulu-Natal, it was the National Freedom Party (NFP), which appeared to be an ANC-sponsored vehicle to unseat the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in many municipalities. And in 2014 it was Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Each time, the media’s attention swung towards these new start-ups, forcing us to do more just to stay on track.
The 2016 campaign in Gauteng stretched every structure to the limit. Recognising the breakthrough potential, the party poured enormous resources into the province. What had once been a big-enough event was now seen as a small gathering. Previously sufficient quantities of posters, leaflets and T-shirts were soon overshadowed by deliveries on fleets of tri-axle trucks. Makeshift local canvassing operations turned into town-hall-sized rooms abuzz all day and night with callers working the lines. A massive workforce of 20000 volunteers knocked on more than one million doors, engaging voters on our key messaging. It was a campaign that, by any measure, dwarfed all others.
There were five mayoral campaigns in Gauteng, each operating off a punishing grid of four to five events per day. All these campaigns were headlined by candidates of political breeding, conditioned by years of political experience, manicured into speech-making, vote-winning machines. All except Mashaba. In Tshwane we had Solly Msimanga, in Ekurhuleni we had Ghaleb Cachalia, in Midvaal it was incumbent mayor Bongani Baloyi and in Emfuleni we had Kingsol Chabalala.
Mashaba began every speech by saying that he was not a politician and never wanted to be one, but that he was standing out of a responsibility to serve the people of Johannesburg. His interviews left many in the party campaign structures grinding their teeth. None more so than when he was asked why poor people should vote for such a wealthy man. ‘Well, at least those people will know that I do not need to steal their money,’ he answered.
But there was something about the man that I perceived from an early stage of the campaign. He had a certain candidness, a fire and a stubborn drive to do what was right rather than what was expedient. These were qualities that I would come to understand and respect. Paradoxically, the very features that made Mashaba an unusual candidate, written off by the media and the commentariat at large, were those that would make him a popular mayor with the residents of Johannesburg.
Mashaba often shared with us his experiences on the campaign trail, of which there was no shortage, given that it involved four or five events a day for nearly seven months. Even years down the line, we were amazed by the detail of his campaign recollections and his ability to recount them when decisions had to be made.
He was greatly affected by his experiences on the ground in Johannesburg. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the deep-rooted inequality in the city before the campaign began; it was the extent to which he was confronted, day after day, by the staggering and stark lived realities of those who suffer, on the fringes of our society, under the legacy of the past and the indifference of the present.
The first event Mashaba attended after being announced as the DA mayoral candidate was on Saturday 23 January 2016 in Zandspruit. As became the norm across the city, Mashaba was struck by the deplorable conditions in which people lived. It was only by being confronted with it, face to face, that you could truly grasp the desperation. He took his daughter, Khensani, along with him and, to this day, she still speaks of it.
Mashaba had decided that he would not dance and sing and call people ‘comrade’. His was going to be a campaign of substance, about the issues that mattered to communities rather than politicians, focused on building a capable government that declared corruption public enemy number one. While speaking about his plans to the community of Zandspruit on a dilapidated soccer field, he began making the first of many connections to the ordinary, forgotten people of Johannesburg. Mashaba worked hard to address the mistrust that people in the townships and informal settlements had for the DA. What quickly emerged was a public appreciation for his authenticity and his ability to connect with people on a very personal level.
During one campaign stop in Alexandra, Mashaba met a young woman who he described as having a presence that would have been felt by the most powerful CEO if circumstances had placed her in a boardroom and not an informal settlement. The woman took the delegation to her shack, where they noted that she had no toilet facilities whatsoever. Mashaba asked her how she survived without a toilet, and her answer stuck with him. She said, ‘Over many years I have trained my body to only require a toilet at my place of work.’ When he told this story in his 2018 State of the City Address, the ANC councillors responded with laughter.
At another event in Kya Sands, Mashaba met a mother of three who cried about her circumstances and begged him to create jobs for people like her in Johannesburg. She spoke of how she was forced to sell her body to men for as little as five rand, and how they sometimes refused to pay her at all. She feared she was going to be killed. When he spoke later to the community, Mashaba asked what they could possibly have done to the ANC to deserve the cruelty of the conditions in which they lived.
In Eldorado Park, as in so many other areas, Mashaba was confronted by the extent of drug and substance abuse among the youth. A sense of hopelessness hung in the air in these communities, where drugs had destroyed families. On one occasion, a mother of an addict wept on Mashaba’s shoulder about her family having been ruined in their efforts to save their son from the grips of addiction. This never left him, and drove him to launch the first city-operated substance abuse facilities in Johannesburg’s history.
It became evident that Mashaba would stand out. Unlike politicians who were out of touch with the needs of the people they served, he would carry these experiences into every meeting, every engagement and every plan. That is the difference between someone who goes into politics with genuine intent to serve people and one who sees politics as a means to serve themselves.
The election took place on 3 August 2016. For the next two days, I was at the Independent Electoral Commission’s (IEC) national results centre in Pretoria with colleagues, watching as the numbers rolled in from polling stations around the country. We already had an idea of what would happen, thanks to thousands of our party agents who were reporting the results from the voting stations. But it’s different when you actually watch the numbers tick over in that results centre, in painstakingly slow fashion.
After going without sleep for three nights, we were now struck by a growing sense of wonder as it became clear that coalition governments could be on the cards in Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Mogale City. Some fell silent in amazement; others couldn’t stop talking with excitement. I stood still in cynical disbelief. I had experienced the unrealistic hopes of previous campaigns come crashing down on me when I was most vulnerable with exhaustion. This time, however, the weight of crushing disappointment never fell. We had brought the ANC