Johannesburg — More than anything, Herman Mashaba's entry into the race for Johannesburg mayor is a story about exhaustion. Coalition fatigue — the accumulated frustration of residents who have watched a revolving door of mayors, governing pacts made and broken, and infrastructure collapse while politicians negotiate — has created the political space that Mashaba is now moving to occupy.
According to recent Afrobarometer survey data, 73 percent of Johannesburg residents rate local government performance as poor. The numbers track directly against a city that has cycled through a succession of mayors since 2021 as the ANC, Democratic Alliance, ActionSA, and smaller parties have traded coalition arrangements with dizzying frequency. Each transition has disrupted institutional continuity, delayed procurement, and deepened the city's inability to address water outages, pothole-scarred roads, and electricity failures that residents in working-class and middle-class suburbs alike now regard as normal.
It is into this moment that Mashaba — ActionSA leader and former Johannesburg mayor from 2016 to 2019, when he served under a DA mayoral coalition banner before founding his own party — has formally entered the race, according to a News24 report. His pitch is technocratic competence over ideological coalition arithmetic: the argument that a single-party mandate, however difficult to achieve given Joburg's fragmented council, is preferable to the permanent instability that multi-party horse-trading has produced.
Johannesburg generates roughly 16 percent of South Africa's GDP. A functioning mayoral administration is not merely a political achievement — it is an economic prerequisite for a country attempting to attract foreign investment while fighting 32 percent unemployment. The city's dysfunction is felt at that macro level, but also at the granular one: in the informal settlement where a pipe burst has gone unrepaired for three months, and in the Sandton office tower where load shedding and water cuts are factored into operational budgets as a fixed cost of doing business.
The ANC's Johannesburg structures have noted Mashaba's candidacy without formal comment, privately calculating whether a Mashaba-led administration would be more or less manageable than the current coalition configuration. DA Johannesburg representatives have been similarly circumspect, aware that attacking Mashaba directly risks validating the coalition-fatigue narrative that most damages their own prospects. Neither party has yet offered the kind of on-record engagement that the significance of the move warrants.
Analysts are more direct. The question Mashaba's entry raises is not whether he can win the mayoralty outright — Johannesburg's council arithmetic almost certainly precludes a single-party majority — but whether he can force a new coalition configuration that gives ActionSA the executive role rather than the balancing role it has played since 2021. The risk, his critics note, is that by competing independently rather than through pre-arranged coalition brokerage, he fragments the anti-ANC vote and inadvertently makes an ANC return to the mayoral position easier.
In South Africa, as across post-conflict societies, the journey from apartheid to true equality requires generations — and constant vigilance. Johannesburg's governance crisis is not merely administrative; it reflects the structural consequences of a city built to serve a white minority, now obliged to deliver for millions of historically excluded residents whose patience with political instability is not unlimited.
For those residents, the question is simpler than the coalition calculations: will anyone finally fix the water, the roads, and the lights?
