The DA is its own worst enemy. By refusing to listen to the grievances of Alexandra residents, Johannesburg executive mayor Herman Mashaba has handed the ANC a major tactical victory ahead of May’s election. And on Thursday ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa will rub salt into the political wound when he visits the township.
Up to now businessman-turned-politician Mashaba has refused to meet residents who are protesting against poor service delivery. Last week, at the height of protests, he chose to call a radio station, telling talk-show host Eusebius McKaiser how busy he is as mayor of 5-million residents, and he would only attend to their complaints on April 15.
If that wasn’t enough, his boss Mmusi Maimane was campaigning at Noord taxi rank with Solly Msimanga, the DA’s premier candidate for Gauteng. Instead of taking a taxi to Alexandra to listen to the residents, Maimane chose to continue peddling the DA’s stale narrative blaming the ANC, which lost control of the city in the 2016 municipal elections.
On Tuesday, Gauteng premier and ANC Gauteng chair David Makhura seized the initiative by visiting Alexandra and holding impromptu media briefings. This visit came a day after Alex residents decided to take their complaints to Mashaba’s doorstep, the city’s regional offices in neighbouring Sandton. And Mashaba was nowhere to be seen.
Makhura presented as a statesman. He humbled himself and stayed away from Mashaba’s bait of politicising the residents’ complaints.
Now Mashaba and the DA have egg on their faces. And it isn’t the first time the party has scored an own goal. Mashaba’s political ineptitude just magnifies the broader shambles that is the DA’s campaign.
The DA has mismanaged several major issues over the past year. To this day its position on BEE remains as clear as mud — it depends on who you speak to, and what time of the day the conversation takes place.
The party leadership also mishandled the messy exit of Patricia de Lille from her post as executive mayor of Cape Town. Today De Lille, who helped the DA consolidate its dominance in Cape Town, is a major political threat to the DA’s provincial campaign. This hot on the heels of another bruising skirmish with Helen Zille, the former DA leader and Western Cape premier.
The EFF, which enabled the DA to run Johannesburg by siding with it against the ANC, is nowhere to be seen as Mashaba rapidly unravels. This is hardly surprising. The EFF treats Mashaba like its ugly mistress. He is good enough as a partner against the ANC, but his gaffes, such as his apparent xenophobic views, make him an embarrassment. Yet, Mashaba continues to defer to Julius Malema’s party — which explains why the arrangement has survived this long.
It is no longer in the interests of the EFF to assist the DA. It has its eye on Gauteng as the ANC scrambles to hold onto its majority in the May 8 polls. March’s moratorium on e-toll summonses by the SA National Roads Agency — instead of scrapping the system — is unlikely to have significantly shored up the ANC’s electoral fortunes in the province. This is especially so since ANC ministers are now sending mixed messages on the issue, which has been a bugbear for years.
Can the DA rescue its mayor even at this late stage? It seems too late. So much damage has been done. The first and major blunder by the city’s first citizen was to mischaracterise the crisis. It does not matter whether he’s right when he says the protests were engineered by the ANC or the result of the ANC’s legacy from governing the city until 2016. Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether the solutions to the community’s complaints are the domain of national or provincial spheres of government.
What matters is that Alexandra residents have a legitimate expectation to be heard by their leaders. Once Mashaba was elected as mayor he ceased to be a DA deployee and became the mayor of all of the city’s residents, including the undocumented immigrants he despises.
Alexandra’s residents are mature and reasonable people. They are not expecting overnight solutions. They need to be heard by their leaders. As Makhura found out, some of their complaints are just about the enforcement of the city’s by-laws, not money. By avoiding the township, Mashaba has made these residents feel like second-class citizens. This is an unnecessary aggravation.
He should take a leaf from his political opponents, such as Panyaza Lesufi, the ANC’s deputy provincial chair and Gauteng MEC for education. Lesufi is also a busy man. But he’s never argued diary congestion when faced with a crisis in any of the province’s schools. He shows up. That’s what Mashaba should do.
• Dludlu, a former Sowetan editor, is executive for strategy and public affairs at the Small Business Institute.
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