Bulk-buying: Herman Mashaba’s signing of Forum 4 Service Delivery may bring him wins in 2026’s local government elections. Photo: X
Thursday.
The January transfer window is wide open.
From a footballing perspective, another crop of promising young players appears to be destined to spend the next part of their careers at best warming Mamelodi Sundowns FC substitutes bench.
It’s something of a biannual ritual in South African football.
Every window the club scoops up the best young talent the rest of the league has to offer, just as it is starting to flourish, to reinforce Sundowns’ already ridiculously star-studded squad — and ensure they don’t play against the club.
Extended benchwarming, unhappiness and departure follow, a twice-yearly chain of events and outcome as cynical, inevitable and at the same time unnecessary as the transfer ritual itself.
Politically speaking, the window is also wide open, although the quality of the talent on offer may be far different from that being poached by the club with the deepest pockets in South African football.
ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has gone full Motsepe in the January window, signing up the entire Forum 4 Service Delivery (F4SD) to try to improve his party’s chances going into next year’s election.
Mashaba only contested a handful of municipalities in 2021 and hasn’t managed to establish the kind of presence he had hoped for in the intervening years.
ActionSA didn’t exactly shoot the lights out in last year’s national and provincial elections either — it got six seats nationally — so Mashaba has reached out to the F4SD going into next year’s local government election.
Local government is the F4SD’s thing: it was formed in 2015 to tackle service delivery failures and it has been doing so at council level ever since.
The latest signing will — on paper anyhow — give ActionSA an instant presence in five provinces, where the F4SD already has 38 councillors, along with 48 000 signed-up members across a variety of municipalities where the party has no presence.
In return, F4SD founder Mbahare Kekana has been appointed as deputy president of ActionSA, a position which the party’s senate — read Mashaba — has created by amending its interim constitution.
Sundowns may not have much of a fan base, but bulk-buying players has won the team plenty of titles, and Mashaba will be hoping that the same strategy works for him in the political arena.
Mashaba’s party isn’t the only one on the market for new signings.
The ANC in the Free State is understood to be tapping up former Economic Freedom Fighters MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi —politically speaking — despite him remaining a member of the Red Berets.
The governing party appears keen to make a high-profile signing of its own during the current transfer window, something it hasn’t done in recent years, perhaps even since floor crossing was abolished in 2009.
It has the space.
Most of the ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal members — and voters — left on a free transfer to join Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party last year, so its squad could do with some fresh talent.
Zuma has been on a spending spree himself, despite having problems with the constabulary and no visible source of income — a political Royal AM — and doesn’t seem to be planning to slow down.
Zuma’s party is understood to have set its eyes on former Durban deputy mayor Philani Mavundla and his Abantu Batho Congress (ABC) party as its latest acquisition.
Zuma apparently wants Mavundla, one of his long-standing allies, along with his party infrastructure, which comes with council seats and political infrastructure at council level.
Mavundla wants the mayorship of eThekwini next year in return for his support in the local government election, but is aware that if he collapses his party now, there is no guarantee that he will be the one who gets the mayoral chain if uBaba’s party takes a majority in Durban.
The old man does have form when it comes to dumping those who help him once they have outlived their usefulness, so Mavundla’s reticence is understandable.
Mavundla will also be watching closely the less-than-warm welcome received by leaders of other parties who have been parachuted into key roles in the MK party.
All appointments carry the MK presidential seal, but the pushback against KwaZulu-Natal convener Willies Mchunu and Busisiwe Mkhwebane, his Mpumalanga counterpart, is real — and growing.
A year is a long time in politics — even more so in the MK party — so Mavundla is currently emphatic that the ABC is not the party secretary general Floyd Shivambu promised in December would be next to join Zuma’s black unity project.