Politics not a rich man’s game
Even if Herman Mashaba becomes mayor, the odds will be against him because the transition from business success to public life seldom works, argues
AS the Guptas have shown, some extremely rich people see political power as an essential part of a balanced asset portfolio. Black business pioneer Herman Mashaba’s dream of becoming Johannesburg mayor is a bit different: it’s a refreshingly honest attempt at “state capture”.
That does not mean his candidacy for the DA is a smart move. In most strong democracies, politics is the preserve of career politicians, partly because tycoons are widely seen as unconvincing servants of the public interest. And most of them don’t fancy the job.
But in those rare cases when they do seek high office, their reputations head south — quickly or slowly.
Either they campaign badly (think Carly Fiorina, Ross Perot, Mitt Romney) or they govern badly (think Silvio Berlusconi or Herbert Hoover, who bedded down the Great Depression by treating the US as a business).
Michael Bloomberg, the business-media baron and boringly successful mayor of New York, is the exception that proves the rule.
What of Donald Trump, who is at once a terrible politician and a nauseatingly good campaigner?
A couple of months ago, former DA leader Tony Leon likened Mashaba to Trump — and he meant it as a compliment. The two men are both outsiders, Leon argued, who are freed by their millions to castigate the corruption at the heart of the establishment.
It’s an unfair comparison. Mashaba is as self-made as selfmade gets. Trump is entirely dad-made, if you count his dollars and not his fame stocks. He would be much richer than he is now had he simply parked all his father’s billions in blue-chip shares.
Mashaba is the son of a Hammanskraal domestic worker who became a cosmetics tycoon: his ascent is all the more impressive for defying apartheid’s chokehold on black enterprise.
It’s a good story to tell, but it does not necessarily translate
There are many styles of leadership: it doesn’t follow that a self-made entrepreneur is authoritarian
into a good political story. The problem with wealthy politicians, self-made or not, is that their spoken or unspoken pitch — “Let me help you be more like me!” — tends not to thrill poor voters, who know that the greedy rich are often as complicit as bad politicians in the maintenance of their misery.
They know that the theory of liberal capitalism is as inedible as any other sequence of words. If you live in Diepsloot, you can pull your bootstraps until the cows come home, but you will all but certainly remain in Diepsloot — and the free market in Sandton won’t notice your absence.
So to seduce the masses, a wily plutocrat needs to somehow repackage his wealth as roguely noncorporate and anti-establishment.
Exhibit A: the spectacle of an unalloyed capitalist like Trump brazenly exploiting blue-collar rage. By slamming free-trade deals and job-exporting corporations, he has trumped the blandly pro-business narrative of the Republican orthodoxy.
Trump’s political illiteracy is his strongest weapon as well as his likely downfall: he mongrelises ideologies in ways that career politicians wouldn’t think to, or dare to.
So, can Mashaba do something similar — and help win Johannesburg for the DA? It won’t be hard to outdo the drab Parks Tau on the hustings, but this isn’t a direct mayoral poll, and ANC voters are used to enduring mediocre deployments at City Hall.
Tau is at least a marginal improvement on Amos “Nestum” Masondo.
Mashaba does have a flair for soundbites, although his anti-BEE remarks have not gone down a treat among those wavering ANC voters who might swing to blue.
His platform, presented in these pages last week, features some snazzy ideas: deploying the Internet of Things to maintain infrastructure, unlocking dead capital by issuing title deeds in informal settlements, breaking up procurement budgets to boost more small enterprises. All well and good. But how would he end a Pikitup strike? How would he strike a win-win deal with the taxi bosses? How would he attack metro police graft? How would he build a coalition with the EFF if necessary?
In the business world, conflicts and agreements are simpler and cleaner: the bottom line and the customer are the supreme variables. Executive power is more sovereign, and “my way or the highway” is a valid management style. The intricate murk of politics can bamboozle an interloper from the business world.
Political analyst and businessman Moeletsi Mbeki disagrees.
“There are many styles of business leader- ship: it doesn’t follow that a selfmade entrepreneur is authoritarian,” he says. “Entrepreneurs like Mashaba have to mobilise a lot of skills and resources which they don’t have in order to make their businesses work. To succeed, an entrepreneur has to co-operate with a huge number of people, and make them happy and motivated.
“What I admire about Mashaba is that he fought against the odds and won. That is an important attribute, when our politicians are promoting entitlement rather than effort and achievement. So I can’t see how Mashaba’s message can’t be beneficial. Our politicians are telling people to be aggrieved about 300 years of injustice. Herman is saying get out there and do it,” says Mbeki.
“The mistake many people make is to assume that when an entrepreneur becomes successful, he goes out smoking cigars and living the high life. Real entrepreneurs like Mashaba don’t work like that.
“Trump is different — he inherited his wealth. Cyril Ramaphosa also inherited his wealth, because BEE is a special form of inheritance.
“As for Berlusconi, I think you are confusing Berlusconi the user of underage prostitutes with Berlusconi the creator of Mediaset. There are three or four Silvio Berlusconis.”
By all accounts, there’s only one Herman Mashaba. If he gets that shiny chain in August, he will have to make it two.