Action SA Leader Herman Mashaba had a tough encounter while on the campaign trail in Alexandra outside Johannesburg. While Mashaba was overwhelmed with service delivery frustrations that residents shared ( most of them visible) it was an insistence by a group that the community no longer want to support political parties that forced him to do a lot of explaining.
“We vote for people to be councillors but once they are in office they start reporting to their political parties and not us, that’s why as a community we no longer support political parties and will be fielding our own candidates in the next local government elections,” said a frustrated resident to Mashaba.
South Africa’s electoral laws do allow individuals to stand as independent candidates but so far there’s not been any meaningful impact by independent councillors with some of them having been swallowed by political parties along the way.
Mashaba said he understood the frustration and lack of trust by residents but warned independent candidates ( or councillors) are not the solution.
“I can tell you of so many examples whether in eMfuleni or Johannesburg where people elected independent candidates but once they got to council, the ANC or other parties would buy them, sometimes through a big position such as MMC at times they make them mayors and then they carry on with the corruption,” said Mashaba.
He said even the most morally grounded independent councillors had a lot of inherent shortcomings.
“In Johannesburg for example you need more than a hundred votes in the council to pass the budget so it’s not possible for an independent councillor to influence the budget because it’s just one person,” said Mashaba.
He referred to his brief tenure as Joburg Mayor as evidence of his commitment and capabilities.
“As Joburg mayor you’ll remember that it was me who blew the whistle on the corruption involved in the Alexandra renewal project, that I was dealing with undocumented immigrants. Before the ANC and DA came with their plan to remove me I had already expropriated 37 factories here that I was going to handover to the private sector for developing into high rise buildings in order to give people of this township homes,” said Mashaba .
Action SA is the first political party to officially launch a campaign for the 2026 local government elections that are to be held on a yet to be announced date.