It’s exactly 3pm when I park in front of a bright white mansion in one of the suburbs in Sandton and Herman Mashaba emerges from a colossal brown door.
We are meeting days before he launches his new political party.
After exchanging pleasantries, Mashaba, dressed in a formal pink shirt, matching pink tie and grey pants, leads me into his house where an art collection is hanging on the walls. There’s hardly any space left on his walls, including in the three-door garage where his portrait hangs.
He explains that the paintings are from artists he sponsored through his Black Like Us exhibition more than 10 years ago.
“So most of these are done by them. Every year I’d always buy it... So, unfortunately, my house is full of art,” Mashaba says.
“I can’t say I’m an avid collector,” he adds, laughing, “[but] I don’t have space any longer.”
But Mashaba, who resigned from the DA almost a year ago, still has a lot of space to cover in his political career. Mashaba initially thought his departure from the helm of the City of Johannesburg would mark the end of his political career and he considered going back into business where he became one of the wealthiest people in the country.
He says he was, however, inundated with requests to consider forming a political movement just as he was making his way out as the Johannesburg mayor.
His experience in business taught him to always be certain of prospects of success before making an investment. When the DA approached him to become Johannesburg mayor in 2015, Mashaba said he undertook a trip to Havard University in the US to ask Lindiwe Mazibuko why she had left the party.
And after leaving Joburg, he hired a company to conduct a study to see if there was an appetite for a new political party. The results of the study gave birth to The People’s Dialogue, which he has termed ‘the second Codesa’, after the negotiations to end apartheid.
Mashaba explains that submissions during three months of The People’s Dialogue shocked him as they surpassed his expectations.
“I said to my family, for me, half a million submissions would be good enough, would give me a sense of proceeding with the political course. Less than that then there’s no point because you can’t go into politics if you don’t have the support,” Mashaba says.
“The project, we ran it from the sixth of December until the end of February. What surprised us was the number of submissions — 2.4 million. I was saying 500,000, I would accept it as a right number [but] we received 2.4 million submissions and of this 2.4 million, 125,000 of them gave us 10- to 12-page submissions. The majority of them were one-pagers, but all in writing saying please start your own political party, people will then give their value proposition.”
A similar trend emerged from the submissions on the route the new political party should take, Mashaba says. Among them was the five core values that will guide the party when he launches it virtually on Saturday.
The values are nonracialism; a free-market economy driven by the private sector and not the government; social justice – pushing for a pro-poor agenda, creating a strong middle class and closing the gap between the rich and the poor; rule of law; and electoral reform, which will see people directly electing their leaders and public representatives.
Mashaba is targeting the big metropolitan municipalities including Johannesburg and Tshwane in Gauteng in next year's local government elections. He says there are growing calls he cannot ignore to also contest in the Western Cape, eThekwini and Port Elizabeth.
Speaking about his party's prospects, Mashaba says he is targeting more than 15 million South Africans who did not vote in last year's elections.
Those eligible voters who chose to stay at home, he says, would be his core constituency according to the submissions received during the three months of The People's Dialogue.
“Our primary target is the 18.5 million South Africans who did not vote the last time. The last elections, 17-and-a-half million people voted, as opposed to 18.5 million who did not vote and half of them did not even bother to register,” Mashaba says.
“Of the 2.4 million, I can tell you roughly 70% of the submissions are [from] people who had given up on voting. If you follow my Twitter or Facebook account and you look at people who register, a big number are saying I had given up, at least I have found a new home.”
His party, he says, will give power back to the people when it comes to the election of public representatives. The party will adopt the US election model.
He says public representatives wishing to represent the party, especially councillors, will have to campaign and hold debates before an internal party election where locals will elect their preferred candidate.
"Thats a commitment I'm giving to South Africans. For you to be a member of parliament, to be an MPL or a councillor representing our party, you are not going to be elected by us behind closed doors," Mashaba says.
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