OUR CITY NEWS: Herman Mashaba targets illegal immigration in bid for Joburg mayoralty

ActionSA leader and Joburg mayoral candidate Herman Mashaba’s ambitions for the city are inseparable from his resentment towards the political parties he once worked with and his increasingly confrontational approach to immigration.

He is gatvol with the ANC, gatvol with the DA, gatvol with corrupt politicians, collapsing infrastructure, rising crime and a Johannesburg he believes has been allowed to deteriorate under successive administrations.

And he is particularly gatvol with undocumented migrants, repeatedly describing them as a threat to the city and country, and often returning to immigration even when the conversation has moved elsewhere.

It is a frustration central to his campaign to return as Joburg mayor after the 4 November local government elections. ActionSA has even adopted the sentiment as its campaign slogan, asking voters, “ Gatvol ? Let us fix it!”

For the businessman-turned-politician, the opportunity to lead Johannesburg again is one he says he is uniquely qualified for, having served as mayor between 2016 and 2019. But his ambitions for the city are inseparable from his resentment towards the political parties he once worked with and his increasingly confrontational approach to immigration.

During the interview, Mashaba repeatedly returned to undocumented migration, describing it as a national threat and promising a dedicated municipal police unit to help remove undocumented people.

At one point, while reflecting on his previous mayoral term, he volunteered that he had no interest in governing beyond Johannesburg.

“I don’t want to be the mayor of the world. I want to be the mayor of the residents of the City of Johannesburg. If someone wants to be the mayor of Harare or Lagos or Lahore in Pakistan, they can play that role.”

Asked to explain, Mashaba turned to immigration, promising to work with the police, Home Affairs and labour authorities to identify and remove undocumented people. He associated undocumented migrants with drug trafficking, counterfeit goods, organised crime and even the financing of international terrorist organisations.

His rhetoric goes considerably further than advocating immigration-law enforcement, promising to declare “war against these invaders” and making the removal of undocumented migrants one of three non-negotiable conditions for any potential future coalitions involving ActionSA.

Mashaba has often been accused of fanning the flames of xenophobia, criticism that has followed him since his first mayoral term. In November 2018, he carried out what he described as a citizen’s arrest of an informal trader transporting cow heads through the Johannesburg inner city.

Defending his actions at the time, he later posted on social media that the City could not allow people to bring “ Ebolas ” into the country in the name of small business. He later apologised following criticism from the South African Human Rights Commission.

In 2020, Mashaba falsely claimed that South Africa had 15 million undocumented migrants, confusing people without identification documents with migrants.