ActionSA president Herman Mashaba told party supporters on Thursday that he is ready to return to his old job as executive mayor of SA’s richest metro and economic hub and continue his mission of bringing investment into Johannesburg to create jobs and provide better services to communities.
Delivering the keynote address at his party’s final rally at the Old Park Station in Johannesburg, Mashaba, a former Joburg mayor, said his administration would ensure that small businesses — which are at the coalface of creating jobs in SA — thrive because “a job improves lives better than government ever can”.
The multimillionaire business-person, who served only three years of his five-year term as DA mayor from 2016, quit the DA and announced his resignation as DA Joburg mayor in October 2019. That followed the election of Helen Zille as the DA’s new federal council chair, with Mashaba saying at the time that her election was a victory for people who stood diametrically against his belief systems.
On Thursday, Mashaba said tracking polls in Joburg placed ActionSA as the “biggest party ahead of the ANC, DA and EFF”.
“In Tshwane the polls put ActionSA within 3% of being the biggest party in our capital city,” he said, calling on the party supporters to be their own liberators and begin the work to fix SA by voting ActionSA during the municipal elections on Monday.
Mashaba spent a considerable amount of time highlighting his successes during his stint as Joburg mayor, saying his administration facilitated increased investment into the city, growing from R4bn to R17bn in the three years he was mayor.
“We took derelict and abandoned buildings and offered them to the private sector. In Johannesburg alone, this produced plans for 25,000 affordable accommodation, 12,000 construction sector jobs and R32bn in investment,” he said.
He said the inner-city rejuvenation projected established a blueprint that can be replicated in every city.
The ActionSA leader promised to fight corruption, saying when he was Joburg mayor he actually fought the scourge by appointing former Hawks boss Gen Shadrack Sibiya to set up an anti-corruption unit. The unit investigated “6,000 cases of corruption, totalling more than R35bn in transactions, leading to over 800 arrests”.
Mashaba promised better municipal services for residents, saying they would ensure residents had access to electricity, potable water and sanitation, and that every RDP recipient had a title deed.
He said local government is not about ideology, “it is about service delivery. It is about roads, houses, electricity, billing and water, and every party believes in this — at least, theoretically”.
“We must ensure that our governments redefine the expectations of customer service, with residents who are treated as customers and city officials who are proud to be public servants.”
Mashaba took potshots at the country’s three largest political parties, saying: “The ANC is a criminal syndicate, not a political party, that attempted to fool us all with the idea that [president] Cyril Ramaphosa would change our country with his ‘New Dawn’. The DA tells you it “gets things done”, but ask the people of our capital city if they agree after three mayors and a provincial administrator in just five years.”
He said the EFF “loves anarchy” and has proposed policies that will destroy SA. ActionSA Gauteng chair John Moody said the bigger political parties were “shivering and shaking” at the support ActionSA was enjoying.
He said the political start-up stood a good chance of governing Gauteng’s metros of Joburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane after the local government elections on November 1.
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