‘Mayor Trump’ targets migrants
Johannesburg’s new mayor, Herman Mashaba, says he’s on a mission to clean up Africa’s richest city, and the prime targets in his sights are undocumented immigrants and allegedly corrupt deals by the officials of South Africa’s ruling party.
The influx of undocumented immigrants is so “massive” that the government should close South Africa’s border, Mashaba said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Johannesburg office. And if the national police authorities continue to fail to bring charges against corrupt officials, as he claimed they have, he said he’s prepared to bring private prosecutions.
“There’s massive corruption happening in our city. Unfortunately, I am not getting the full co-operation of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA),” Mashaba said. “If we had a functioning criminal justice system in this country and the city of Johannesburg we’d need special prisons because the cancer of corruption was already an accepted value system.”
Mashaba, a 57-year-old former cosmetics entrepreneur, said he’s privileged to run the city as a “capitalist.” He’s cut a controversial figure since taking office in August when his opposition Democratic Alliance aligned with small parties to take control of Johannesburg, the capital Pretoria and Mandela Bay, in a municipal vote.
A “shock and awe” campaign he’s considering, to remove thousands of unauthorized inhabitants from buildings in Johannesburg’s centre, has drawn criticism from organizations that Mashaba dismisses as “so-called human rights groups.”
“Mashaba often plays on the fears that migrants are taking over our economy,” said Jacob Van Garderen, the national director of Lawyers for Human Rights. “He can be likened to Trump. They play off the same play book.”
Mashaba said his goal for downtown Johannesburg is to move people out of “hijacked” buildings, hire private companies to renovate them and then rent them to people earning at least 4,000 rand ($397 Canadian) a month. About 135,000 people in the city centre are from households that earn less than 3,200 rand a month, according to the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, known as Seri, citing census data.
The mayor’s comments run the danger of inciting violence against foreign nationals, according to Seri’s executive director, Stuart Wilson.
“What the city should be doing is providing affordable public rental housing to the poor where they currently are, not touting xenophobic and illegal plans to displace them, which have almost no hope of practical implementation,” he said.
Constitutional experts dismissed Mashaba’s suggestion that he may need to conduct private prosecutions against alleged corrupt officials, with Pierre de Vos, of the University of Cape Town, saying since Mashaba is part of the government, “it can’t be done.” The NPA’s spokesperson, Luvuyo Mfaku, said it doesn’t prosecute cases on the basis of forensic investigations it hasn’t carried out itself.