The Power of One Tough Zulu

In 2020 young Mbali Ntuli took on the might of the Democratic Alliance establishment and ran for the leadership of the party against John Steenhuisen. Not unexpectedly, she lost and not long afterwards branched out on her own — not, like many of the black leaders who left the DA after the last general election, to start her own party or to join another one but to start her own civil society organisation. She founded the Ground Work Collective and started simply doing what she loves — civic work in communities around the country and mainly her native KwaZulu-Natal. So successful has she been that Ground Work has found the funding to put 4000 election observers in place for the May 29 poll. “A lot of the stuff that I said when I ran for the DA leadership was what I wanted to do anyway,” she tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “It would have been great to do it with a big institutions and a big machine because I think it is the kind of stuff South Africans really want … I didn’t join another party and I didn’t start one. I wanted to show that I could go back into communities and continue the work that I’ve been doing for two decades. And I put a lot of my own money in initially because people don’t really believe politicians and obviously a big part of the criticism I received the I ran for the DA leadership was that I was young and inexperienced which was absolutely not true so for me this was also a big Fuck You. I could do it!” The discussion centres on how politics works in KZN. These are Ntuli’s streets after all….