A capitalist takes Braamfontein Hill

The City of Joburg's new DA executive mayor, Herman Mashaba, is a successful entrepreneur but has his work cut out in his new job. File picture: Dumisani Sibeko

The City of Joburg's new DA executive mayor, Herman Mashaba, is a successful entrepreneur but has his work cut out in his new job. File picture: Dumisani Sibeko

Published Aug 24, 2016

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Will Herman Mashaba have to shake off some ideological constraints as he takes on the role of mayor? asks Janet Smith.

Johannesburg - It’s going to be quite a shift from Fredman Towers in Sandton, where new mayor Herman Mashaba had his offices as a businessman, to Braamfontein, where the City of Joburg holds court.

Sandton is the nucleus of the ANC’s programme of cadre deployment to capital, although transformation has been slow at the highest levels, with the number of black chief executives decreasing among South Africa’s top 40 companies.

Braamfontein, meanwhile, represents the rise of young black people in both revolutionary and social roles.

Mashaba, undoubtedly both an iconic and controversial figure, will have to straddle both worlds over the next five years, while drawing closer the millions of Joburg residents who are neither rich nor being educated. And to do that, he might have to compromise on aspects of his ideological position which, at 56, is well entrenched.

It’s that which was rumoured to have threatened the DA’s chances of governing Joburg when the EFF, kingmakers in Africa’s most important city, at first raised a red flag against the billionaire who launched his legendary Black Like Me company in 1985. To those detached from the rooted class consciousness of South African politics, this might have felt like an unnecessary frustration. To the elders in Mashaba’s village - who remember how his prescient grandfather, delighted by his birth in 1959, named him “Highman” - the opposition was, perhaps, ironic.

But for the EFF, and many thousands more voters in Joburg, Mashaba’s overt capitalism was a potential drawback which, in council meetings and policy debates to come, could yet trouble the benches.

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Mashaba was, for example, until recently the chairman of the Free Market Foundation (FMF), an organisation which champions neo-liberalism - a theory inimical to the left and the worker movement in South Africa and a standard-bearer for private sector interests.

Litigious on behalf of those interests, it lost a high-profile, costly action to compel the labour minister to alter some aspects of the collective bargaining system in May. The challenge against the FMF briefly united Cosatu and Numsa, which stood together with the government, 47 collective bargaining councils and the SA Clothing and Textile Workers Union in a matter launched by Mashaba while he was still chairman.

The high court in Pretoria ultimately dismissed the bid to deny the minister the right to extend agreements to non-parties, the FMF having argued that the law threatened business in terms of wages. But Cosatu was reported to have been angry enough at Mashaba’s role in the case to call for a boycott of his hair products.

Yet Mashaba has long been an overt patron of capital, saying in an interview in 2012: “I have always seen myself as a capitalist. That’s the one thing I encourage South Africans to have; this capitalist kind of mentality... I’ve always declared my economic tendencies as a capitalist.”

Those words are the antithesis of what stands in the EFF’s manifesto, although EFF MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi made it clear to an online newspaper this week that the party is “interested in policy, not positions or personalities”.

In its negotiations with the DA, it was therefore focusing more broadly on how to achieve its own policy pillars in the longer term when it agreed to support the party in the first council sitting on Monday, when Mashaba was voted into office.

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It will now be an absorbing, if fraught, exercise to see how Mashaba and the DA’s de facto saviours, the red berets, debate on policy. The other smaller parties, including Cope, which also assisted the DA into power in Joburg, are closer to the DA’s liberal economic positions.

Mashaba openly praised the EFF for supporting the DA, but it is clear that the EFF has placed the marginalised black poor at the centre of its fight as an opposition in Joburg. Its main strength on behalf of that constituency is expected to come in debates on the Integrated Development Plan - a statutory requirement for urban strategic planning - and how the city’s budget is allocated.

Mashaba has already made substantial shifts in his life. He told The Star in 2014, for instance, that he was “deeply suspicious of whites” when he was growing up, preferring to gamble and even sell dagga to make money rather than work as a gardener in the suburbs.

This was an important impetus for his business plan, which he started to develop as a sales rep in the early 1980s. And so, it was perhaps outside of his expectation at that time that it was a white Afrikaner colleague, a pharmacist at the SuperKurl hair product company, in whom he first found a partner.

Writer Helen Grange described for The Star how Mashaba’s colleague Johan Kriel “came up with a perm lotion that substantially reduced the normal production time, allowing Black Like Me to compete with SuperKurl - proving it could produce quality products in a factory 20 times smaller than theirs”. It quickly went huge.

His first attempt to strike a corporate partnership came in 1997 when Black Like Me went into business with Colgate-Palmolive in a deal that saw Mashaba retain 25 percent of his company.

But, disillusioned with that environment, he bought his company back, and later helped develop Lephatsi Investments, which has access to global investments and operates in mining, construction and logistics. Mashaba has until now been its executive chairman.

But he has been skirting the fringes of the DA's herarchy ever since he took party membership in the general election year of 2014. Even at that time, there were rumours that he would be a mayoral candidate this year, having been lobbied to join politics. At that time, however, he denied to a Sunday newspaper that he would consider standing.

He told City Press: “I don’t think I’m ready at this point in time. I would be a stupid politician. But one thing is for sure. I am committed and will do everything possible to help the DA in campaigns as a card-carrying member, but not as an official.”

Then-Joburg caucus leader Vasco da Gama was also being considered as a mayoral candidate by some within the city's party leadership. He won the role of Speaker of the council on Monday. Mmusi Maimane was being touted as an option too, back in 2014 when he was parliamentary leader, and had he not been elected party leader in May last year, Maimane might this year have campaigned for a second time to be mayor after he lost at the polls to the ANC in 2011.

But as late as October last year, the race was still on, with names including those of Gauteng MPL Khume Ramulifho and MP Makashule Gana being mentioned, and Mashaba still saying that although he'd been approached, he'd decided to remain an ordinary member and fundraiser.

However, once he finally made himself available in December, the gates seemed closed, and by January he had accepted, saying, “It’s now time to turn the page on the past and write a new chapter.”

Working with the left could well define that new chapter, with the EFF's Ndlozi explaining the relationship with the DA by saying in an interview: “We have voted for you, but we are not a part of you”.

For Mashaba, this is a fresh challenge.

The Star

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