From 26 to Number One: Ex-gang general wants to be Nelson Mandela Bay mayor | News24
- Julian Julies, a reformed gangster, has his sights set on becoming Nelson Mandela Bay’s next mayor.
- Julies says he has used his past to do good.
- He started his own political party after leaving the Patriotic Alliance.
A former gang member, and by his own account, a high-ranking general of the notorious 26 gang, Julian Julies, is vying for the mayoral chain of the embattled Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality.
Tattooed from head to toe, the rehabilitated drug user and self-confessed virgin of Nelson Mandela Bay politics says that instead of shying away from his past, he uses it to do good.
The 47-year-old Julies has spent time in South Africa’s prisons, where he says he did what generals do: maintain order, uphold a code, and manage people in circumstances that would break most people.
Julies told News24 he was recruited into gang life at 15 and became addicted to drugs. By the 1990s, he was a fully fledged gangster who was in and out of prison on charges relating to drugs, murder, attempted murder, unlawful possession of a firearm and robbery.
He was never convicted of murder or attempted murder and is eligible to stand in the elections.
His political origin story was not inspired by a community meeting, a mentor or a burning desire to serve, but rather by being seemingly “blue-ticked” by Patriotic Alliance (PA) leader Gayton McKenzie.
According to Julies, he was promised a plane ticket to Johannesburg but was then ignored. The trip that never materialised prompted him to start his own party, the 1812 Movement, which will appear on the ballot papers of Wednesday’s local government elections.
Gayton McKenzie and the blue tick that launched a ‘movement’
Before the 1812 Movement, before the TikTok fame, before the manifesto and the pure-virgin coalition stance, Julies was a loyal PA soldier.
In 2024, he was elected PA national chairperson. “I was seconded, approved; I still got the minutes of that meeting,” he says, adding that he was given a mission to recruit gangsters.
Julies says McKenzie wanted him to go to prisons and get the 26s, 27s and 28s to vote for the PA in the 2024 national elections, with a promise that they would receive five years of amnesty in return.
Julies, with his rank, his reputation and his relationships, says he was the man who could walk into those spaces, and so he did.
He says he engaged gang leaders across South Africa, made the case and did the work.
Then came election season and his promised trip to Johannesburg never came.
“I resigned,” he says.
Julies went public on TikTok in August 2024 and spoke about what he calls his “uncomfortable truth” about the PA.
170 000 followers and a language from 1812
“People started urging me, telling me: ‘You are the one who inspired us to vote for the Patriotic Alliance, so why don’t you start your own political party?’”
At the time of his resignation, Julies had approximately 170 000 TikTok followers, drawn not by polished political messaging but by two informal languages – Fanakalo and Sabela. Fanakalo was developed on the mines in the 1800s as a way for the bosses to create a language to instruct workers, and Sabela is a secret code developed by the numbers gangs in prison.
He has been using it in his content, spreading what he describes as a broader message: stop the gun shooting, stop the drugs, there are bigger things to achieve.
“I discovered that people find it attractive,” he says. “People find it interesting.” His top three videos, he notes, are built on it. The views, he says, ran into the millions.
And so the 1812 Movement was born.
Julies describes Mambazo as the movement’s spiritual founder: a leader who recruited young men to stand against colonial oppression, united ethnic groups through language, and built a force powerful enough to take back what had been stolen.
“This is the first movement ever in existence in this country that was creating a language to communicate,” he says.
“Imagine putting yourself in a situation where there are different tribes in one room, none of us can understand each other, while we are being oppressed by the oppressor, bound by chains as slaves.”
He explains the movement’s colours: green for the land, red for the blood of fallen heroes, white for peace.
Support for his self-funded movement, Julies says, has filtered in from the USA, Australia, China and Namibia.
“We have never received an actual funder who signed a document; we fund this movement on our own. As 1812, we say enough is enough. We are the only movement that can stop gangsterism with immediate effect.”
The manifesto and the R1 million
On the party’s proportional representation (PR) list, Julies is number one; he is the mayoral candidate, and he is also contesting Ward 11 (Schauderville, Korsten, Sidwell, Gelvan Park, Parkside, Newton Park (parts), Cotswold, Young Park and Sydenham).
“In total, each year, I will give R1 million out of my own pocket, not with government money, with nobody’s money, with Julian Julies’ money,” he declares.
Large amounts will go to soccer, rugby and cricket, he vowed.
Julies is not leaving the spinning and the stance communities behind. These are vibrant, youth-driven subcultures centred on custom vehicles, automotive stunts, and heavily modified low-riding vehicles.
He makes some big promises.
These communities will receive R200 000 each, with the spinning community being given land to operate and spin their cars from.
Every registered sports club will get R10 000 per year for five years, plus a full kit; every pensioner in Ward 11 will get R2 000 per year.
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“Because the pension is too small,” he says, “and when the pension money comes through, it goes to the skoppers (money lenders).”
As mayor, he promises more: the dilapidated Schauderville swimming pool will be rebuilt exactly where it used to stand.
“No white man will come tell us where we must build. We are the community,” he adds.
Other promises include: The upgrading of the Adcock Stadium and the handover of the Moore Dyke Facility, a R50 million project sitting vandalised, three years past its handover date, delivered within his first 100 days.
In Julies’ first financial year: A “Community Skills Development Centre”.
On coalition partnerships, Julies says: “The partners must know, if they want to partner and want to go to bed with me, that I’m like a pure virgin.
“The politicians are looking at me: who’s gonna sleep with Julian? Because the person that sleeps with me is gonna have a hell of a time. I’m not going to let them break my [virginity] so quickly.”
The coloured vote, the ANC wards and the sex work metaphor
He spoke at length about the systematic exclusion of coloured communities from integrated development plan (IDP) meetings, from municipal tenders and from the economic opportunities that flow through the City’s “ANC-controlled” wards.
“When it comes to IDP meetings, specifically in ANC wards, the whole entire executive, the mayor, the deputy mayor, the whole metro, will be in that meeting,” he claims.
“Hundreds of millions of rands will be allocated in that specific ward, because that is where the ANC is eating from. They are feeding their families from it. They are feeding their brothers, their chommies from it.”
He is targeting wards 41, 47, 50 and 53, all ANC strongholds, calculating that a split field of ANC, MK Party, EFF and others could open a PR door for 1812 with as few as 1 000 to 2 000 votes per ward.
His assessment of past coloured political leadership is withering.
He describes voters being lured with food parcels and R100 notes at election time, then abandoned to darkness, dry taps and broken roads.
“When 4 November comes, everybody is silent. The prostitution is over. Everybody was selling themselves.”
‘I’m a man of action’
Julies says he has experienced the very problems he is promising to fix.
“We are the only movement that can overcome gangsterism in this country, because I have a record pass. Till today, I engage still with gangs, and I tell them straight: look here, what you are doing is wrong.”
He describes building a community centre in his personal capacity, taking people off the streets, feeding, sheltering and employing them.
“I took them from the bin. I give them a job. They receive a salary of R12 000 to R18 000, and they look after themselves.”
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He is blunt about the chaos of internal politics.
“In politics, you can’t even trust your own woman, you can’t even trust your own wife,” he says.
“You’re dealing with people with different attitudes.”
He manages this, he says, the same way he managed it inside prison: with patience, standards and the kind of authority that comes from lived experience.
As for the growth of 1812?
“Massive, massive, massive, massive support, from young to old. The mothers are getting on board. The children who are on drugs, they are getting on board.
“I’m a man of action. So I want to ask people to vote for 1812.”