Leader without all the baggage
Helen Zille’s bolt from the blue on Sunday has left Mmusi Maimane with the considerable prospect of leading the DA, making even his campaign of four years ago seem slight, writes Janet Smith
MMUSI Maimane peered forward politely to have a closer look at photographer Boxer Ngwenya’s pictures.
Reassuringly, this was not about vanity. In an open-necked shirt, he playfully requested Ngwenya to avoid what he called the “reaphuza” look.
“You can’t really have your mayoral candidate being pictured like that,” he pointed out with a smile. Yet the DA’s choice for Joburg was as far from the “reaphuza” – or hardpartying – image as Sandton, where he first joined a party branch, is from Dobsonville, Soweto, where Maimane grew up.
Handsome and clever, the 34year-old is some distance away from that interview in 2011 when he was a surprise choice to take on the ANC’s Parks Tau in the wake of party veteran Amos Masondo.
Tau was his party’s committee member for finance, the official who effectively oversaw Joburg’s billing fiasco. The city at that time reflected the fastest-growing rate of debt among the country’s metros, a situation which the mayor has since set out to improve.
But, styled as a philanthropist who can speak seven South African languages, Maimane’s youthful integrity was a cunning choice on the part of the DA at the time. As it introduced its surprise element – a young black man, apparently without the liberal albatross – it held only 27 percent of the council. The ANC had barnstormed into power with a solid 62 percent. Gauteng also had the highest approval levels for President Jacob Zuma, at between 56 and 58 percent.
Unlike the ANC, whose cadre deployment has allowed sometimes fatal skills deficits in many municipalities, the DA held interviews to find Maimane, a business consultant and trainer, lecturing in diversity and generational differences at the Gordon Institute of Business Science.
A product of the party’s electoral college, he was working towards his second master’s degree at the time.
“I hope people have the luxury to rethink their position,” he said that year, after a political roadshow to the Zandspruit informal settlement in Roodepoort.
Maimane – whose maternal family
Mmusi Maimane is making a careful pitch for the national role as DA leader, says the writer. is from Cofimvaba, Eastern Cape, and his father from the old Bophuthatswana – got involved in formal politics when he discovered through an NGO where he was working how difficult it was for Aids orphans to access state intervention.
He explained how “we must always be conscious of how to get the best deal for the poor. The ideological national issues have to be set aside in this election.
“This is about bread-and-butter issues. Is the water clean? Is the city safe? Do we have an infrastructure that can provide properly for our citizens?”
Maimane was 19, just out of matric at Roodepoort public school Allen Glen High, when he queued at the polls for the first time in 1999. Thabo Mbeki was the presidential candidate.
“I voted ANC back then. I just wanted the best, but my ideas have progressed since then,” Maimane said, crediting his parents with his confident value system.
Helen Zille’s bolt from the blue on Sunday has now left him with the considerable prospect of leading the DA, and that would make his mayoral campaign of four years ago seem slight.
His history teacher wife Natalie – who grew up in a struggling white family in Florida, Roodepoort and who he met at school – was on maternity leave when he ran for mayor. Their first child, a daughter named Kgalaletso, was only nine weeks old.
They now also have a toddler son named Kgosi, although the Maimane family is rarely pictured in the public realm, and Maimane has completed his second master’s, in public and development management. The first was in theology.
But it’s not only his domestic and intellectual life that has expanded since he made an unsuccessful bid for mayor, going on to lead his party’s caucus in the council instead. He spent months targeting Tau and using the city’s dire finances as a way to keep inside the frame. The DA published secret documents on the issue as more than 3 000 unresolved billing queries gifted it a lever, and soon Maimane was the most visible and vocal politician in Gauteng.
He spoke out loudly on everything, from The Spear painting saga to demanding the axe for ANC KwaZulu-Natal MEC Meshack Radebe, who had accused blacks who joined the DA of being “confused”.
“As a black South African who is keenly aware of our country’s painful past, and who has chosen freely to support and participate in the DA’s vision of creating a better future for all, I am personally incensed,” Maimane said.
“We must free our politics from racial division.”
Once he became the DA’s national spokesman and its deputy federal chairman, his national and internal profile intensified, giving him a platform for broader social contact.
He railed against the rape culture, saying men who couldn’t respect women should be named and shamed. He lashed out at then minister for women and children Lulu Xingwana, saying comments she’d made about Afrikaner men were “offensive and divisive”.
By January last year, as his party aligned its forces ahead of the election and made Maimane its candidate for Gauteng premier, he was taking President Jacob Zuma on, openly, using e-tolls and the abuse of public funds for traction.
He was also making more powerful speeches. Speaking at the Apartheid Museum in February last year, he revealed his childhood memories of “living under the threat of violence. My first memory of white people was of SADF soldiers occupying the streets… As I get older, the memory of those soldiers remains vivid.
“I don’t think they ever realised the fear they instilled in us… Or maybe they did. Maybe that was the point.
“The social distance… meant I knew very little about whites. My perceptions were based on strange stereotypes and random observations. It has taken me years to shake off the misperceptions I once had.”
But the terrain is more complex for him now and, possibly, less emotional, as he approaches the DA congress next month. There’s an urgency around its leadership, which has not been able to access massbased politics. Yet, while his rise has been rapid, Maimane has been significantly weathered in his latest role as parliamentary leader. He stepped into a fiery seat against the backdrop of the outspoken Lindiwe Mazibuko. He reinvented it for his own purpose and has exceeded her.
This is partly because he didn’t carry such overtly alienating Model C baggage, and partly because his ideological direction has been less traditional. That has allowed him to have a more general appeal in a context where young voters seem to have found more offence in colonial history than in the terrors of apartheid.
As the DA endeavours to shift its emphasis away from the Western Cape, where its voter support has not always reflected the considerable difficulties the province faces in terms of poverty, race and labour, it is precisely those subjects which will dog a new leader.
But Maimane, whose most prominent moment was taking on Speaker Baleka Mbete at the State of the Nation address to lead his MPs out of the House, is making a careful pitch for a national role.
“There are more than a million young voters who are my age,” he has explained. “They have no sense of patronage and they’re not bound by a particular history. I have no political connections, so I’m also part of that space within which we play.”
The games no doubt begin on May 9 at his party’s congress.