From a drug-busting, streetwise television presenter in a bullet proof vest, to ActionSA mayoral candidate for City of Ekurhuleni, Xolani Khumalo is hardly the political suit SAffers are used to. Unlike a Dada Morero or Kabelo Gwamada, or any of the prominent mayors that usually have us scratching at our collective pates to ask, “En nou? Who the heck is this guy?” Khumalo is something of a household name.
Not in politics or academia, not even the clergy but the domain that the whole world knows: entertainment. And if the party’s leadership were headhunting for an easy sell, it won’t take much to convince people of a certain quintile that Khumalo might indeed be the man for the job.
Unlike many of his predecessors and opponents, it wasn’t too hard for MAGA staffers to get people sold on the man famous for Trump Tower, The Apprentice, or any of the many interviews The Donald has sat down to over the years. Sounding decidedly less conventional – nothing beaurocratic about him – and speaking as was his wont like the dropout, women-loving uncle who kept it simple and called it as he saw it, he brought a different air into contemporary American politics. Less of the political fluff and jargon, Donald Trump was the jackboot cowboy who promised building a wall to keep the undesirables away from the American dream.
Moja Love (DSTV channel 157) where Kumalo’s Sizok’thola show is aired, is a popular black channel, known for controversial, shock-value type shows that feed the social media reels and get pundits riled up enough to write incendiary op-eds. That it’s often criticized as trash TV that leeches on the carcass of black misery and moral degeneration, its programmes nonetheless continue to draw big numbers.
Its presenters, like the controversial Molemo ‘Jub Jub’ Maarohanye jailed in 2012 on culpable homicide when two years earlier he and Thema Tshabalala had driven their cars into kids coming from school, killing four of them and injuring two others, are instant celebrities. Khumalo was himself the subject of controversy when he was charged but later acquitted in the death of an alleged drug dealer.
There is X Repo, the show you contact when somebody owes you some money or an item of value. There are shows about virtually everything – from dancers who don’t wear undergarments to exposing fathers who don’t pay child support. It is amid these disparate offerings that Khumalo emerges. Descending on drug dens at ungodly hours, he has built a reputation as the lone ranger who is fighting drugs on the streets and ensuring dealers get what’s coming to them.
The sort of township hero who goes where few would dare and gives the viewer access to how he feels criminals should be dealt with. Forthrightly. Up in their face. Looking them dead in the eye. If the chattering classes lament the channel’s supposed obscene attitude towards black suffering, Khumalo’s show offers some redemption.
When it has grown clear that faith in both politicians and law enforcement is on a downward slump, people have increasingly been looking for everyday heroes. Not for nothing that people and organizations like Operation Dudula or Nhlanhla Lux have come into the fray. Or for that matter, that General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s testimony before the Madlanga Commission attracts the numbers of a prime-time soap opera. Not only is there a palpable appetite to dig up the rot, but there is also the desire to see those who are fingered for it pay. And on Khumalo’s show, there is the perception that he is making the scumbags pay, very fast.
The mayoral candidate speaks
It is therefore not a surprise that the fight against crime features prominently in Khumalo’s – or ActionSA’s – 10-point plan for Ekurhuleni. Speaking with Bongani Bingwa on 702 Breakfast, Khumalo said he was offering the residents of Ekurhuleni ‘the basics. So our aim is to fix the basics and make sure that we give them services that work.’
Amongst his list of key priorities is the upgrading of informal settlements. ‘Criminality,’ he notes, ‘has become a lifestyle. Law and order is what Ekurhuleni needs. If you can go to Thembisa right now you’ll see that communities have gated themselves. They’ve created boom gates where there shouldn’t be boom gates because they are afraid of criminals. Criminals must be afraid of the law and the law must protect the people.’
In this regard he has promised to establish units that will ‘tackle the drug syndicates, the gangs, the illegal mining because those are the people that are terrorizing the communities.’ Also, he aims to make Ekurhuleni ‘investable’ by reviving and upgrading its industrial sector.
As to what qualifies him to the mayorship: ‘I’m a citizen who has experienced these things’ he says, ‘the fact that the country has supported me in the work that I’ve been doing in my own capacity and in the capacity of Moja Love it has shown that people do believe in me. And I’m responsive.’
‘I respond to the needs of the people. As I was running my foundation people spoke to me directly, mothers were crying and we were there to assist. It touches me a lot because I’m also from the same background. I’ve walked the streets of Ekurhuleni, I grew up around that community so I know exactly what it needs.’
It was actually when he was looking for funding for his foundation that he was roped in by ActionSA leader, Herman Mashaba. According to an IOL interview, at this meeting the ActionSA leader simply turned to Khumalo and said: ‘You shouldn’t be asking for help, you should be working on a much broader scale.’
Said Mashaba: ‘How about you become mayor? Clean the city, do what you do, and help the people of South Africa realise what they need to realise.’
The interview answers aside, the question on most people’s minds is whether Khumalo realises the monumental task before him? Does it really matter that he is not a career politician? Is he aware how deep-seated corruption is especially in the metro? Given that his drug-busting work offers little security outside of filming, how much more effective might his efforts stretch when he has access to a blue-light convoy and the attendant security? But perhaps most importantly, does a television crime-buster have the wherewithal to fix up and maintain an economically-strategic part of the country.
In 2021, no party won an outright majority in Ekurhuleni and ActionSA came in fourth after the EFF with a total of fifteen seats in Council. Over the years, its leader, Herman Mashaba has made a name for himself as a practical man who delivers results. Perhaps Khumalo has been chosen to give a more youthful, accessible face to the greybeard Mashaba. And of course, that he also happens to be a celebrity doesn’t hurt. Just ask Trump and Schwarzenegger.
Featured Image: Xolani Khumalo (left) at an ActionSA event. Source: ActionSA Facebook page.