There is something about Herman Mashaba’s particular brand of hypocrisy. It is delivered with a confidence that suggests, internally, he has fully inculcated whatever new truth he advocates, as if it had always been the truth and he its brave and faithful keeper. It was always thus, is the impression you are left with.
Conviction is the strongest currency in modern politics. Any conviction will do. That it has become so powerful at the expense of truth and honesty matters little. People are drawn these days to strong views, like a moth to a flame. And so we live in a great age of demagoguery, the world over.
Here in SA we have Mashaba, a man willing to say night is day if it plays well enough in the moment. And the moment is all that matters. He has, over the past three years, said anything and everything at one point or another.
His masterpiece, however, he held back for his resignation as Johannesburg mayor this week — a wonderful piece of rhetorical sophistry he orchestrated like a conductor of fireworks, making dance the many and various explosions that illuminate his state of mind. It was quite something to behold.
A symphony of sophistry
At the heart of his most recent performance were two fundamental contradictions. The first, that he deplored the prospect of the DA abandoning race as the non-negotiable lens through which our troubles must be understood. The second was that the election of Helen Zille as DA federal council chair and, presumably the embodiment of this sickening nonracial approach, constituted another development he could not stomach.
One could dedicate 1,000 words to demonstrating Mashaba’s hypocrisy on this front. Two examples will suffice.
The first, a speech he delivered in May 2015, to Solidarity’s Shadow Report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, no less.
In it he decries race-based policy as racist itself, taking the sword of truth to BEE and affirmative action in no uncertain terms. “It was unacceptable to have job reservation during apartheid and it is unacceptable now,” he said with familiar, Mashaba-like absolutism.
“Racial policies are the cancer that is directly responsible for these unacceptable levels of unemployment,” he concluded.
The second is his historical attitude to Helen Zille, best captured by a March 2019 tweet, in which he said in her defence: “In all the years I have known Helen Zille, including reading extensively about her beautiful life, anyone calling her racist is actually racist herself/himself. Helen is one those South Africans I personally hold with the highest esteem. I am proud of her as my fellow South African. Period.”
Trump could learn a thing or two from Mashaba: for all the US president’s lies and hypocrisy, he doesn’t switch from being a rampant capitalist to a raging socialist at the flick of a switch
All of that has changed now; that is, if ever it were true. Now, according to Mashaba’s resignation speech, “I cannot reconcile myself with a group of people who believe that race is irrelevant in the discussion of inequality and poverty in SA in 2019.”
He should have stopped at, “I cannot reconcile myself”.
As for Zille, he says: “The election of Helen Zille as the chairperson of federal council represents a victory for people in the DA who stand diametrically opposed to my beliefs and value system, and I believe those of most South Africans of all backgrounds.”
In the run-up to his election as mayor, way back in 2016, he said, “Politics for me, is not really about people, it is about policies,” before explaining why, ever since 1999, the DA had been the party for him.
The allure of temporary conviction
You can see why DA leader Mmusi Maimane — whose response to all this double-talk and deceit was to call Mashaba his “hero” — is drawn to the man. Mashaba has everything Maimane lacks. Specifically, conviction.
The DA leader cuts a sad, desperate and pathetic contrast to Mashaba these days. To his credit, and whatever you make of the mishmash of vacuous platitudes that define Maimane’s increasingly race-obsessed view of the world, his favourite position is exactly on the fence between any two ideas. Mashaba doesn’t care what side of the fence he is on, but at any given moment he is absolutely situated on one side or the other. That sort of certainty must be like political Ambrosia to Maimane.
It’s a cheap shot to call Mashaba SA’s own Donald Trump. Trump could learn a thing or two from Mashaba: for all the US president’s lies and hypocrisy, he doesn’t switch from being a rampant capitalist to a raging socialist at the flick of a switch. Even Trump knows you have to be consistent on some things. Mashaba could be one of Koch brothers or Fidel Castro, depending on what he had for breakfast.
He knows a lot of phrases, does Mashaba — things such as “right-wing” and “liberal”, which he throws about with abandon, as he responds to whatever detonation just went off in his brain. But he only knows the words — no meaning and certainly no evidence. Thus, no credibility. His is a world of slogans, just as it is for any demagogue. He is a self-promoting marketing machine, not a man of principle of consistency.
It is tempting to say Mashaba is not stupid. But he does make that sentiment hard to believe. Some of the things he says — immigrants carrying Ebola or his critics belong in Orania — are so far off the deep end, you feel whatever intellectual complexity he manages to feign is held together more by his support staff than personal insight. Left to his own devices, he seems quite capable of questioning the moon landing.
He will say whatever he wants, whenever he wants, about anyone or anything, so long as, at the end of it all, Herman Mashaba emerges better off than before he started. That’s the Mashaba Golden Rule — the bottom line. It’s remarkable he has one.
Red-flagging the race card
It would, however, be a mistake to put all this recent hypocrisy down to nothing more than demagoguery. If there is one thing, above all else, that should raise a red flag in SA, it is when a politician under pressure starts to play the race card.
What exactly has gone on in Johannesburg the last three years? There is some clandestine “agreement” with the EFF. Helen Zille, you can be sure, will want to see exactly what that was.
The EFF, which is largely responsible for providing much of the intellectual pollutants Mashaba has ingested as mayor, parades around the degree to which it owns Mashaba — “the EFF’s mayor” — with great pride. Much of that is probably to irk the DA, and should be dismissed as politicking.
But there are more worrying claims and statements. Among them is that the EFF was vetting appointments in the administration. According to Julius Malema, “Every time they bring a name that sounds European, we say that name must go and occupy the last position because this is our country.”
Then there are various scandals, which have not yet been fully resolved, all involving the EFF too. If Zille does apply her mind to all this, who knows what she will find. Given that Mashaba is all about Mashaba, when all is said and done, that is one possible explanation for his hysterical, puerile and hypersensitive response to recent developments in the party: he has something to hide.
The DA faithful, blindly following the disloyal behaviour of their leader, as always, were quick to take to social media and praise Mashaba more than damn him
I guess we shall see. Not that it matters, really. In the sense that whether he has something to hide or not, it says little about his behaviour, which will remain consistently inconsistent regardless. Remove the hypocrisy from Herman Mashaba and all you will be left with is that fragile narcissism that underpins so many political personalities.
The DA faithful, blindly following the disloyal behaviour of their leader, as always, were quick to take to social media and praise Mashaba more than damn him. When did the DA become so meek? You understand he trashed you from one end of the media conference to the other, right? No need to be immature, just call a spade a spade, it’s not hard. Read the public record —it speaks for itself.
As for Mashaba, who knows what he will do next. Perhaps it’s back to the Free Market Foundation, so he can once again become a nonracial free-marketeer. Or perhaps he will join the EFF, so he can fight for “blackness” and radical socialism. Both options are fairly on the table.
What have we learnt?
So, as the perplexed general at the end of the movie Burn After Reading says, “What have we learnt?” For Mashaba, nothing. Obviously.
For the DA, don’t try to make people who are not DA into DA leaders. The party is a long way off from even acknowledging that is a problem.
For the EFF, victory. The total indoctrination of a free-marketer into a mad racial nationalist, at least for the moment, and the resultant chaos it so loves to wallow in.
For the people of Johannesburg, who knows. But not good whatever it is.
Will the mayor with a thousand faces ride again? You can be sure he will — with conviction, contradiction and the indignant self-righteousness that holds it all together. He has that formula down pat. And it has worked wonders for him.
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