Bruce E

Let’s discuss Herman Mashaba. He is the founder of the hair product company “Black Like Me”. This became the biggest hair brand in SA and made him a millionaire. He joined the DA in 2014 and publicly backed Mmusi Maimane since 2015. He wrote an autobiography “Black Like You” and his campaign manager, Michael Beaumont, recently published a biography called "The Accidental Mayor". In 2016, Mashaba was elected Mayor of Johannesburg. He announced his resignation in 2019. After launching his new party, Mashaba announced he would run for Mayor of Johannesburg again in the 2021 municipal elections as the ActionSA candidate. Mashaba paid an author, Prince Mashale, R12m to write a supportive and unauthorized biography, which has now been withdrawn by publishers. Mashele also lied about the book’s financing in the media, saying it was self-funded, before later saying he had lied due to signing a non-disclosure agreement with Mashaba. Amongst other outlandishly complimentary sections, Mashale wrote: “If I thought he was hardcore DA, I could have simply studied the DA to actually understand him, but I knew that he actually transcended the DA and he was never groomed in that party”. “My findings at the end of the day is that he is actually an intersection of ideologies. He calls himself a liberal, but I realised that that's not the beginning and the end of the man.” “There is a very strong black consciousness streak on his path. The idea of black dignity comes out in a conversation I had with him and he is so obsessed with it. Which is what drove him to venture into business in the first place.” “So he could not bring himself into the idea of working for white people. The idea of black dignity lives in him and I have scanned his private study and remember there is no book of black consciousness by Steve Biko, it comes from his lived experience that his mother was a domestic worker and abused by his employers who were white at the time,“ Mashaba said: “the book was able to capture my life from an independent perspective.” After Mmusi Maimane left the DA in 2019, Mashaba followed soon after, starting Action SA in 2020. Mashaba is a man who: Became rich with hair products, entered politics under the guise of the DA, backed a disastrous black DA leader, followed his departure, started his own party, took his lackies with him, bribed a respected author for good publicity, has race-bated for more publicity on multiple occasions and has politicked and damaged SA for his own personal power-gain. He has not proved that he deserves any trust or support.