Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA launched its inaugural manifesto at Old Park Station in Newtown, Johannesburg, on Wednesday and identified rooting out corruption as being on top of its agenda.

Addressing scores of supporters, who refer to themselves as Actioneers, Mashaba said by having ethical leadership at the helm, the party would “reorient government into a people-centric organ that delivers services to communities”.

“For too many years, local government has become unresponsive to the needs of the people and communities; they have become entities that exist to serve themselves and have divorced themselves from what public service is meant to be.” 

He added ActionSA would be a caring government that would deliver on its promises because it had ethical leaders at its helm.

Mashaba said the party’s mayoral candidate for eThekwini, Makhozi Khoza, had “stood up as an ANC MP to [then-president] Jacob Zuma during the height of his power and publicly declared her intension to vote in favour of a motion of no confidence against him”.

He also credited another leader, Vytjie Mentor, as being “part of the reason the country has the State Capture Commission of Inquiry today because she stood up and exposed the infamous Guptas for offering up ministerial posts like shares in companies”.

Mashaba said when he served the people of Johannesburg as mayor, he too went on a corruption-busting drive by establishing an anti-corruption unit “and appointed a former Scorpion to run it”.

“We recruited the best professionals as investigators and they were given the mandate to do their work without political interference. The outcome of this process was more than 6 000 cases investigated which exposed R35 billion in questionable transactions and over 7 000 arrests.

“This is the ActionSA track record that you can believe when I say there will be such a unit in every municipality we govern.” 

He promised to institute “measures to financially incentivise whistleblowers who come forward” and to ensure they were protected.

Mashaba pledged to “appoint a non-governmental organisation to observe all City tenders”, saying it would be mandated to report publicly on any form of wrongdoing, which would be acted on decisively. 

He added his party held the view “residents of municipalities are the customers of these municipalities and have the expectation of receiving quality and reliable services that they deserve”.

To achieve this, Mashaba said ActionSA would do away with wasteful expenditure.

“When I had the privilege of serving the people of Johannesburg, we inherited levels of wastefulness that you could not believe. From R379 million to billions on radio adverts to R1 million on DStv subscriptions.

“The only good thing about this was that I was able to redirect over R2 billion from this kind of waste and redirect it to the most pressing needs of the City, such as electricity, water, roads and housing, in such a manner that the capital budget rose from 58 to 71% in just three years.”

He added the party “as part of a people-centric approach, will begin the process of negotiating all Eskom supply areas that will be handed over to our municipalities”. 

“Communities who are supplied directly by Eskom have been abused for far too long. They are residents of these municipalities and yet they are treated as second-class citizens by a failed state-owned enterprise while municipalities shrug their shoulders.

“As we speak right now, there are communities in Soweto that have been without electricity for months, among them people who are willing to pay but cannot even access electricity because whole communities are painted with the same brush which is against every principle in our Constitution.”

Mashaba also promised to bring back the rule of law as well as “deliver an environment where businesses and people prosper”.