Africa-Press – South-Africa. ActionSA president Herman Mashaba continues to be a thorn in the side of the DA, his former party, after snapping up yet another top DA leader.
Michael Shackleton, the DA’s Gauteng North regional deputy chairperson, announced on Thursday via an uploaded video message that he had resigned from the DA to join ActionSA.
He cited “the regression of the DA as an inclusive home for all South Africans, and its abandonment of being an electoral alternative to the ANC” as the motivating factors for his resignation.
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Shackleton, 34, served as a member of the National Assembly, a City of Tshwane councillor, as well as a member of the Gauteng legislature as the DA’s community safety spokesperson.
Shackleton is a resident of Ward 96 in the Tshwane metro, where a by-election is set to take place next Wednesday. He said one of the reasons for his resignation was because of how the DA treated his community in Ward 96.
Shackleton added:
He said he had witnessed that DA leaders were nowhere to be found when the Pyramid substation burnt down and when Coetzee was working with City technicians to help restore electricity.
“I witnessed how the DA has put forward a candidate for this by-election who did not come first in their candidate selection process. He was just the only candidate who lived in the ward.”
“Now, when there is a by-election happening in our ward, suddenly, it is like the DA realised for the first time that my ward and my community existed,” he said.
“Suddenly, [Tshwane] Mayor Randall Williams cares enough to come into our community and speak about the service delivery needs of our ward. Suddenly, John Steenhuisen and Helen Zille are in our ward every other day, pretending that they care about this ward. But where were they? Where were they over the last six years? Where were they when our ward needed them?” Shackleton said.
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He said he believed DA leaders would once again disappear after the by-election and be “nowhere to be found”, leaving the community without basic services.
DA Gauteng chairperson Fred Nel denied Shackleton’s claims, saying the party “held Michael (Shackleton) in high regards but it’s very disappointing that he decided to leave while peddling lies about the DA’s internal processes”.
“For someone who claims to have a master’s in constitutional law, it’s disheartening for him to be so dishonest. The allegations that he made are all lies, it’s all fake. In terms of giving support to our councillors, he would have known that the DA was the only party in the Tshwane Municipality to have financially supported its councillors. No other parties did that when they were not given salaries,” said Nel.
Nel added:
Nel said that contrary to what Shackleton had said, he himself had provided support to Coetzee and had messages from the latter to prove this.
“When he asked for help with provincial roads, we hired people, and he thanked me for it, so the narrative that Shackleton is trying to generate, is a total lie.”
Nel said it was concerning that “ActionSA and Mashaba have decided to try and raid the DA cupboards rather than focusing on the main problem in society that is the ANC”.
According to him, such an undertaking just splits the opposition and does nothing in the quest to remove the ANC from power.
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Mashaba said “the fact that the deputy chairperson of the DA in Tshwane is willing to resign as a member and as a public representative of the party that he served for 14 years serves to demonstrate the extent to which the residents of Ward 96 have been mistreated and failed by the DA”.
He said ActionSA was proud to be attracting South Africans of Shackleton’s calibre.
Other prominent former DA members who have joined ActionSA’s ranks in 2022 are former Midvaal mayor Bongani Baloyi and former Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Athol Trollip.
“This speaks both to ActionSA’s continued rise within South African politics, as well as the continued collapse of the long-established political parties,” said Mashaba.
He also said a number of prominent South Africans across the political spectrum, as well as professional South Africans without prior political histories will be joining their ranks in the coming weeks and months.
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