Now listen here, Mashaba

Joburg’s ex-mayor’s downfall was due to lack of meaningful dialogue, not because his councillors were ‘small-minded and largely white’.

Councillors were bemused when Herman Mashaba launched People’s Dialogue. His style is monologues. His mayoral tenure was characterised by non-listening. He was deaf to councillors who elevated him. People’s voices were stifled.

Michael Beaumont’s book, The Accidental Mayor, exposes the mindset behind this undemocratic behaviour.

Councillors are depicted as stupid – “No amount of training could put in what God left out of these folks” – immature and unable to grasp the complexities of coalition government.

We are also portrayed as racist opponents of “Mashaba’s pro-poor agenda”.

Beaumont says Mashaba did not want “to be part of a small-minded, short-sighted, suburban-based and largely white opposition party”.

Neither Mashaba, nor his hagiographer, is equipped to judge our IQs or our unheard views. It was they who created an unnuanced binary choice: either toilets or grass-cutting, one or the other. Not both.

Mashaba is not consistently pro poor. He turned down my suggestion of a facility for homeless people. He said voters would resist. I disagreed.

The poorest of the poor, the nonvoting homeless, were neglected by Mashaba.

Beaumont “lost all sense of attachment to the party” during a meeting with DA councillors about the town planning Nodal Review.

Having attended the meeting, I say he misconstrued the situation to fit preconceptions about ignorant defenders of suburbia.

He portrays attendees as, “white councillors incapable of empathizing with those living on the periphery of the city”.

Yet the core issue was lack of meaningful public participation. Dialogue. Heard of it?

Mashaba and Beaumont kept their distance from many councillors. They were surprised when, in June 2019, party leader Mmusi Maimane, “made the unexpected pronouncement that we would not consider any arrangement with the EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters]”.

I was not surprised. Two weeks earlier, I had written to Maimane, “some cllrs will resign if EFF MMCs [members of the mayoral committee] are appointed in Johannesburg. In addition, there will be serious electoral consequences for the party. The elevation of the EFF is not what we stood for, and not what our voters voted for”.

Others sent similar messages in response to EFF leader Julius Malema’s boast that his party would have Joburg MMCs. Remember, not one of the city’s 135 wards elected an EFF councillor.

Mashaba’s kowtowing to the racist, VBS-looting, tender-loving EFF was his undoing. Beaumont thinks the EFF are against corruption. Seriously.

“EFF Mayor” (page 127) Mashaba caused the party to lose a precious council seat, Ward 109. At a caucus breakaway later in 2019, councillors made it clear they would rather not be in government than be in bed with the EFF.

Until then, Mashaba had refused to listen. Now, with answers highlighted on conference room screens by professional facilitators for all to see, truth was inescapable. Things unravelled from there. Mashaba resigned before an ANC-led motion of no confidence scheduled for November. As Beaumont says: “What chance would he have stood anyway”?

In his new role, Mashaba may listen to fellow xenophobes and yes-men employees. Dialogue? Doubt it.