Former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba on Tuesday described Mmusi Maimane as a good man, and said he would have liked for him to have been part of his new political party that will contest next year’s municipal elections.

“Unfortunately Mmusi had other ideas, that he wanted to do, that he is already doing…. he tried to explain it to me but I honestly don’t know,” Mashaba told a small meeting of journalists on Tuesday evening in Rondebosch.

“But he is a good person as a human being, he is not as brutal as I am and he is a nice man, and I would love to work with him.”

Mashaba distinguished their ways of working as diametrically opposite and himself as brusque, with no time for equivocation – a frequent criticism of Maimane by former colleagues.

Mashaba and Maimane left the official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) within days of each other in October 2019, with Maimane’s reasons for stepping down as party leader carrying an echo of those given by Mashaba for exiting the party after three years as Johannesburg mayor.

Both accused the DA of not being a non-racial political home for all South Africans.

They founded the People’s Dialogue, a forum that seemed a prelude to marrying their political fortunes in a new party.

Instead Maimane founded the One South Africa Movement, which seeks to support independent candidates, and Mashaba launched a new party, ActionSA.

The party plans to contest the local government elections in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni in the local government polls.

He confidently predicted that voters would defect from the African National Congress (ANC) and DA en masse to give it an outright majority in Johannesburg and Tshwane, but said he had been considering fielding candidates in Cape Town and meetings with residents this week had convinced him there was support for doing so.

Mashaba described himself as a committed capitalist with a quest for social justice and the DA as a “right-wing” party. He termed the ANC “a criminal syndicate” destined to disintegrate and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) a racist party.

He described his term as mayor as a bruising struggle with DA colleagues who were not prepared to put resources into services for poor areas where people had not voted for them and eventually conspired with ANC councillors to oust him.

Mashaba said he believed ActionSA could rob the DA of a majority in the City of Cape Town, and if he managed to do so, he was pragmatically prepared to enter into a governing alliance with his former party.

“And if that happens we will make sure that the DA commits on social justice, otherwise they can go in with the ANC.”

Maimane could not be reached for comment on Tuesday evening.