Herman Mashaba

And they're actually very lucky that the AC's campaign on that side of the world has been so flat.

And the Social Research Foundation Common Sense this week also finding that Herman Mashaba is just a hero of note.

No, I don't like his virulent anti-migrant positioning during this campaign, but he is somebody who is very well liked.

And if there's anyone able to eat into the ANC, it's Herman Mashaba.

He used to be with the DA, now has his own party, Action SA.

Yeah.

So ANC comes down.

The DA grows not as much as it wants to.

You know, you have a situation where you also poll the individual leaders and what their, you know, to what extent they were preferred for mayor and essentially, I mean, and Helen Ziller came out to say 30%.

Herman Mashaba was surprisingly high.

I mean, what do you, how does it work when you have Herman Mashaba at 23% yet the party is likely to get far below that? What does that say about the disjuncture between the person and the party? I mean, how are we supposed to read that?

Yeah.

First of all, on those questions, what stood out is the large don't know that we got.

John, it's a complicated thing, obviously.

You would have, for example, let's take the example of Herman Mashaba and Johannes Beck.

He fits exactly your description.

He is a successful entrepreneur.

and will not rock up for any live debates.

But Herman Mashaba might be a pivotal decision maker in places where ActionSA potentially gets enough votes to be a minority coalition partner in a ruling government in not just Joburg, but also other places.

So we need to talk about Herman Mashaba today on the show, including what he said about Helen Zille.

which is very important if you're living in Johannesburg.

Welcome to the show.

And aside from that, ActionSA doesn't have a lot to trumpet about.

They didn't do very well at all in the national government elections in 2024.

And part of that, I think, was by their own making, because if you initially succeed in a very specific place, and then you try to extrapolate that popularity across the whole country before building structures in those places, getting local leaders to sign up, because that initial success was because Herman Mashaba was mayor of Johannesburg.

That is the case, John, but I think first before any additional money is raised from the overburdened rate payers and residents of these municipalities, the first trick is to make sure that government tightens its own belt.

I know from the time when Herman Mashaba was the mayor of Joburg, two billion rand in wasteful expenditure was redirected from the frivolous kind of things like international travel and self-promoting advertising, uh, and all the things that government officials love to do on public money.

And those funds were redirected to the service delivery and infrastructure priorities of the city in such a way that the capital share for electricity, water, and roads went up from fifty-eight percent of the budget to seventy-one percent of the budget.

Now, I think it's entirely possible that these measures can be taken.

Yes.

So the earlier interventions you make into that water network have the highest return on investment, and the answer is not complicated.

When Herman Mashaba was the mayor of Joburg, and I'll keep saying that because ActionSA doesn't have to make things up, we've actually got leaders who've done these things before, two hundred kilometers of water pipes were being replaced every year.

That figure is now twenty kilometers in the city of Joburg, and it just demonstrates how the eroding financial position of these municipalities allows for infrastructure to be under-invested in, uh, while politicians prefer above-the-ground events, uh, and programs that are easier to market than the underground infrastructure priorities.

It was launched on April 2020 with the hashtag Put South Africans First.

And at that time, it was Herman Mashaba and Fuyo Zungula from ATM Party who were the main proponents of that hashtag.

So there's been six years of building a community here.

that has had paid amplification active in the community the whole time.