ActionSA president Herman Mashaba announced on Thursday that the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) Tshwane regional deputy chairperson Michael Shackleton had joined ActionSA.

Shackleton resigned on April 28 from the DA as a public representative and as a DA member. He served as a DA MP, Member of the Provincial Legislature and a City of Tshwane Councillor.

Shackleton said his resignation arose from a number of things about the DA that had changed.

“It is no longer the party that I joined. However one of the reasons why I resigned is because of how the DA has treated our community since 2016 and now in this by-election,” he said.

Mashaba explained that Shackleton’s reasons for leaving the DA were not dissimilar to those of many others who had left the DA or those who were still attempting to leave the DA.

“Specifically, the reasons cited by Michael Shackleton include the regression of the DA as an inclusive home for all South Africans and its abandonment of being an electoral alternative to the ANC. Of particular interest are reasons which are entirely unique to the individual in question,” Mashaba said.

He further said the fact that the deputy chairperson of the DA in Tshwane was willing to resign as a member and as public representative of the party that he had served for 14 years served to demonstrate the extent to which the residents of Ward 96 had been mistreated and failed by the DA. 

ActionSA is proud to be attracting South Africans of the calibre of Shackleton, regularly, since the start of 2022, he said.

Mashaba explained that this spoke both to ActionSA’s continued rise within South African politics as well as the continued collapse of the long-established political parties.