Former Johannesburg council speaker Nobuhle Mthembu. (@cllr_mthembu/X)
Former Johannesburg council speaker Nobuhle Mthembu, who has left ActionSA, says some of the party’s councillors are only staying in their positions for salaries.
She accused them of looking for greener pastures in the Democratic Alliance (DA) and other political parties.
“What I know right now is that ActionSA councillors are there for the salary they get in council and that’s why they are still there,” Mthembu told the Mail & Guardian on Monday after her resignation from the party last Friday.
“Should an opportunity arise for them to cross the floor to another political party, I can tell you now, they will leave. Even when we were in council, there was the opportunity where the Democratic Alliance had opened the programme where, if you want to be their councillor, you need to apply. DA councillors were telling us that our councillors had applied.”
Mthembu said it would be interesting to see how many ActionSA councillors stayed in the party after the council was dissolved for the 2026 local government elections.
Mthembu resigned from ActionSA, citing internal dynamics.
In a letter to the ActionaSA regional secretary dated 8 August and seen by the M&G, Mthembu wrote that she believed the party must foster open discussions, transparency and democracy, adding that despite efforts towards addressing these concerns, meaningful change had not been forthcoming.
“I wrote to the region about my resignation, but if you check the national, it was the one responding to it in a statement. Where is the region, where in the provincial leadership it is going straight to the national?” she said.
Mthembu said even at her time as caucus leader, the party did not allow her to make decisions about the caucus, with national officials doing that instead.
“There has also been a bit of bullying, when you are a leader and you start challenging certain things, so it also speaks that you must know your place. These are the internal dynamics we were talking about,” she said.
Mthembu’s suggestion that some ActionSA councillors would readily join the DA comes after the party announced in February that it had opened opportunities for all South Africans who aspired to represent the party in Gauteng metros to apply for positions. This was not only limited to DA members but to all citizens including those in other political parties.
The DA said candidates would be subjected to screening, interviews and written tests to see if they fit the party’s goals.
On Monday, DA Johannesburg caucus leader Belinda Kaizer-Ozukwechuku told the M&G that those who had applied for positions, including herself, were not privy to the process and had no way of knowing who the other applicants were.
Last month, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party’s head of elections, Bongani Baloyi, said his party had been approached by ActionSA and DA councillors in Gauteng who promised to bring it voters in exchange for council seats should they join it.
Baloyi said the party had advised the councillors to publicly announce their intentions to join without making any demands for positions and not to use the MK party to try to extend their political lifespan. But both ActionSA and the DA denied that their councillors were looking at the option to join Jacob Zuma’s party.
ActionSA had been expected to hold its first elective conference this year with party president Herman Mashaba touted to be its first democratically elected president.
But given that elective conferences tend to give rise to people lobbying against each other, some in the party fear the process could divide it and create a platform for internal purges. In addition to Mashaba, the party is being run by its deputy president, Johannes Lekana, and national chairperson, Michael Beaumont.
“There was a process to restart the whole membership from scratch after the elections, meaning all membership ceased to exist after the elections and we had to start all over with the membership system,” Mthembu said.
She added that the party was not moving fast to register members, resulting in a delay in holding the elective conference.
“We are questioning ourselves to say, ‘will this conference ever happen’, because the party is four years old now. Surely we need to have an opportunity to go and elect our own leaders,” she said.
“We were supposed to sit for a regional conference in June and we are in August, and we were supposed to have the provincial conference in November, but at this point in time there’s no more discussions about that.”
She said although the MK party had also been bashed for not having internal democratic processes, and being run according to the whims of its leader Zuma, that party at least had the excuse of still being relatively new compared with ActionSA.
“The MK makes sense because it’s a new party, but ours has been long and people are tired of the fact that there are people at the top who sit there, meaning there is no democracy and only those few will control the direction of the party,” Mthembu said.
She said as things stood, Mashaba had the power to remove people from the party without any reason, something which could be prevented by going to an elective conference.
“If they appoint you, tomorrow they can come and tell you to let go of this position,” she said.
In the 2021 local government elections, ActionSA surprised many in Johannesburg when it emerged as the third largest party with 44 council seats, only smaller than the ANC and the DA.
Mthembu warned that the party’s support in the metro would probably decline next year, citing what she called neglect of the region by the ActionSA leadership compared with the energy dedicated to Tshwane.
She said with the emergence of the MK party, Floyd Shivambu’s Mayibuye iAfrica party and Mmusi Maimane’s Build One South Africa, competition would be stiff and ActionSA would need to fight to retain its 44 seats.
“They neglect Johannesburg and I don’t know how they are going to win it back. The decisions they have made in Johannesburg have made a lot of people turn their backs on us,” she said.
“[Mayor) Nasiphi Moya [of ActionSA] is doing a wonderful job in Tshwane; this is the support all of us as leaders need. I felt that in Johannesburg, the support was not there for me.
“In Tshwane, it’s more governance, and in Johannesburg, it’s more grassroots. The residents of Johannesburg will say, ‘You said let’s vote for you, and we voted for you, but what did you do for us?’ That is where the problem will arise. In Tshwane, they will have a good story to tell.”
