Herman Mashaba proved himself to be a highly successful businessman, and a competent mayor of Johannesburg (in glaring contrast to his ANC predecessors and several pathetic and appallingly poor successors). His political nous does not match his record. He ought to think very carefully about his current path because when his party fails, he will ruin the political careers of some good people in his party.

He fought the election by swearing that it would never put the ANC in power and that a deal with the ANC would be over his dead body. Despite this, ASA spent the whole election campaign attacking the DA, rather than the ANC. The voters took note and ASA in Johannesburg lost 200,000 of the votes it received in the previous municipal election. ASA is Cope in the making.

Opposition voters, not the lunatic left in the EFF and MKP, clearly wanted a GNU or Coalition, call it what you will. The ANC lost huge swathes of its support. It had no option but to negotiate a government with a secure Parliamentary majority. ASA was determined to stay out of it and its handful of MPs sit on the sidelines, receiving little or no publicity or media attention, and certainly with minimal impact.

Premier Panyaza Lesufi of Gauteng always ploughs his own furrow. He is winning again. He was responsible for inflicting on Johannesburg an ANC/EFF/PA/ Al Jama Ah coalition, producing two execrable mayors in succession. He was also responsible for the inadequate coalition running Ekurhuleni. Lesufi was determined to keep the DA out of his Gauteng Government and made derisory offers he knew the DA would have to decline.

We heard that Mashaba, Lesufi, and ASA were contemplating a Johannesburg flip-flop, despite the promises to the voters. And so it transpired. A new ANC mayor was installed, and the former mayor, an incompetent, was made a member of the Mayoral Committee. Likewise, Speaker Margaret Arnold, of the AIC, was publicly humiliated and dethroned.

With no discernible qualifications for this mammoth task, she was put in charge of Johannesburg’s R84 million budget. The only change was that a young ASA councillor became the Speaker. That was Mashaba’s price. The new Speaker then made a fool of herself, making a robust speech spelling out all her priorities. The problem was that her priorities had almost nothing to do with her role as Speaker and everything to do with the Mayoral role.

This despite Mashaba declaring that ASA would not be running the city, it would merely vote for the ANC and hold it and its coalition partners to account. The new mayor, Dada Morero, set the record straight by saying that little would change during his mayoralty. Thus, for a job, ASA was prepared to flip-flop on its promise to the voters and put the ANC in control.

Mayor Morero, after a week or so in office, similarly made a fool of himself by saying he wanted to appoint foreigners to the JMPD. The ANC forced him to retract and apologise to the citizens of Johannesburg. Every unemployed South African in the city is demanding employment. Not a great start. ASA will not escape some of the blame for the blunders.

Now ASA has agreed to stab its Tshwane coalition partners in the back. It will join in a motion of no-confidence, clearly aimed at putting the ANC, and the EFF in power, with a figurehead mayor, Dr Nasiphi Moya, utterly disloyal to her close colleague, Cilliers Brink.

They want to remove the charismatic, talented, and highly effective Brink and his DA-led coalition government in which ASA serves. Mashaba’s price for handing over power to the ANC and EFF is to put an ASA mayor into office. I have been in politics for a long time and Herman Mashaba might not be prepared to take advice from anyone, least of all, me.

I predict that if he allows his party to do this flip-flop, Action SA, from being a 1.5% party now, will slide down to 0.5% in the 2026 municipal election. Far better to encourage a good working relationship with the DA within the ruling Tshwane coalition and forget about allying himself and ASA with an ANC on the skids, both in Tshwane, Johannesburg, and South Africa.

ActionSA should be ashamed of itself and its leader. The few who voted ASA in the General Election based on Mashaba’s blood oath about not putting the ANC in power certainly are.

Douglas Gibson is a former opposition chief whip and a former ambassador to Thailand.

Article first appeared in The Star