Johannesburg Mayor Resigns, Splits With Party

Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba meets with U.S. Consul General Christopher Rowan (left) and former District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams (right). (Flickr)

Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba announced his resignation on October 21 after three years in office. In his statement to the press, Mashaba stated that he chose to resign from his post due to his political party’s attitudes towards racial inequality in South Africa.

Mashaba formerly belonged to the Democratic Alliance (DA), the primary opposition party to the ruling

African National Congress. The New York Times notes that the DA is a historically white party, and Mashaba served as one of the party’s top-ranking black officials.

"I cannot reconcile myself with a group of people who believe that race is irrelevant in the discussion of inequality and poverty in South Africa," Mashaba said in his statement.

Mashaba also cited the election of Helen Zille to a high position within the party as a factor in his leaving. As BBC reports, Helen Zille is a white politician who faced intense scrutiny in 2017 following a series of tweets which touted positive aspects of colonialism in Africa. BusinessDay reports that Zille was elected to serve as the DA’s federal council chairperson during a DA convention on October 20, just one day before Mashaba’s resignation.

The former mayor viewed Zille’s election as a sign of unwelcome changes within the party. “I am gravely concerned that the DA I signed up to, [sic] is no longer the DA that has emerged out of this weekend’s Federal Council,” Mashaba said in a statement released on social media before his resignation. He also called Zille’s triumph “a victory for people in the DA who stand diametrically opposed to my beliefs.

Mashaba is not the only politician to leave the DA. According to the New York Times, Mmusi Maimane, the DA party leader, and Athol Trollip, the party’s federal chairperson, both stepped down from their positions at a meeting on October 23.

In his statement, according to the New York Times, Maimane discussed his continued efforts to expand the DA’s appeal to black South Africans. Maimane claimed that the party’s attempts to achieve this goal were undermined by a "consistent and coordinated attempt to undermine my leadership and ensure that either this project failed, or I failed.”

These three resignations and the fear of more departures puts the DA in a precarious position for the 2021 elections. However, Al Jazeera reports that DA officials remain optimistic, and that this shift in leadership "does not signal an end to our commitment to the people of Johannesburg and South Africa."