Lindiwe Mazibuko

Lindiwe Mazibuko
18th Leader of the Opposition
In office 27 October 2011 – 6 May 2014
Leader	Helen Zille
Preceded by	Athol Trollip
Succeeded by	Mmusi Maimane
Member of the National Assembly of South Africa
In office 6 May 2009 – 21 May 2014
Personal details
Born	(1980-04-09) 9 April 1980 Manzini, Swaziland
Nationality	South African
Political party	Democratic Alliance
Residence(s)	Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Alma mater	St. Mary's Diocesan School for Girls, Kloof University of Cape Town University of KwaZulu-Natal Harvard University
Occupation	Academic former politician musician
Profession	Educator
Website	www.mazibuko.org

Lindiwe Mazibuko (born 9 April 1980) is a South African writer, activist and former politician. Between 2011 and 2014 she was the parliamentary leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly of South Africa. She is currently the chief executive officer of Futurelect, a non-profit organisation focused on civic education and skills development in African public service.

Early life and education

Lindiwe Mazibuko was born on 9 April 1980 in Swaziland into a mixed-race family. At the age of six she moved to KwaZulu-Natal with her parents. Her father was a banker and her mother a nurse.

Mazibuko grew up in Durban and matriculated at St Mary’s DSG in Kloof in 1997. She pursued a Bachelor of Music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and then moved on to obtaining a BA (French, Classics, Media & Writing) at the University of Cape Town in 2006 and a BA Honours (Political Communication) in 2007.

Mazibuko’s career in politics started when she decided to write her honours dissertation on Helen Zille at the time when Zille took over leadership of the Democratic Alliance (DA) from Tony Leon. Mazibuko spent time doing research into Zille’s tenure as Mayor of Cape Town and DA Leader, as well as into the DA's policies and programmes of action. She found them to be very much in agreement with her own ideologies and political vision for South Africa.

After matriculating at St Mary's DSG Kloof, Lindiwe Mazibuko chose to further her studies at university. A graduate of the University of Cape Town, Mazibuko wrote her honours thesis on the DA after then party leader Tony Leon stepped down in 2006. Upon graduating Mazibuko took up a post in the DA as the party's media liaison officer in Parliament.

National Assembly of South Africa: 2009–2014

Labelled a "star performer" by party leader Helen Zille, Mazibuko became a parliamentary candidate for the party in the 2009 general elections. She appeared third on the DA's KwaZulu-Natal list, thus qualifying for a seat in Parliament as the DA retained its status as the Official Opposition. She was subsequently appointed as the DA's Shadow Deputy Minister of Communications, and also succeeded Donald Lee as the party's National Spokesperson.

She was elected DA Parliamentary Leader on 27 October 2011, beating incumbent Athol Trollip in a tight race, becoming the first person of colour to lead the Opposition in the Parliament of South Africa, as well as the Democratic Alliance's parliamentary group.

In December 2013 Mazibuko appeared on a special edition of the BBC’s Question Time, broadcast from Johannesburg. Other panelists on the show included Peter Hain, Andile Mngxitama, Eusebius McKaiser and Pik Botha. The main focus of the show was the legacy of Nelson Mandela.

Mazibuko resigned from her position as a member of the Official Opposition in 2014, to study at Harvard University in the United States for a year. She stated that her resignation had nothing to do with differences within the DA, but that it would improve what she could offer the party politically. It does appear, however, that there was a serious and fundamental tension between her and party leader Helen Zille that led to her departure. Zille stated that Mazibuko knew she would lose the election for Parliamentary Leader, calling her move to Harvard "plan B". She became less popular towards the end of her tenure, and was described as arrogant and autocratic by members in the DA's caucus in Parliament.

Later career

Civil society

In May 2015, Mazibuko graduated with a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was a John F. Kennedy Fellow and Edward S. Mason Fellow. She spent the second half of 2015 as a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, and in 2016 she was a fellow at Stellenbosch University's Institute for Advanced Studies and a participant in the Munich Young Leaders Program, a joint initiative of the Munich Security Conference and the Körber-Stiftung. Thereafter she moved to London, England, where in 2017 she joined the board of the Apolitical Group.

In 2018 Mazibuko co-founded the Apolitical Academy, a partnership between the Apolitical Group and Swedish financier Daniel Sachs which aimed to provide non-partisan training to prospective public servants. In June 2018, Mazibuko announced that the academy had accepted its inaugural cohort of 25 Public Service Fellows, who would participate in a nine-month training programme; she ran the pilot programme from Johannesburg. In subsequent years the Apolitical Academy became Futurelect, a skills development non-profit focused on ethical leadership in African public service, and Mazibuko became its chief executive officer.

In September 2023, ahead of the May 2024 South African general election, Mazibuko launched Futurelect's new civic education programme, which she said aimed to mobilise young voters by reaching over a million South Africans. As part of that programme in March 2024, in collaboration with M&C Saatchi Abel, the organisation launched the Futurelect Civic Education App, a voter education vehicle for young voters. While these projects were ongoing, Mazibuko returned to Harvard in the spring of 2019, invited by R. Nicholas Burns to serve as the Fisher Family Fellow in the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs; in 2023, she began a two-year programme as a member of the inaugural cohort of Keseb Democracy Fellows. She also writes a weekly column for the South African Sunday Times.

Politics

Within months of Mazibuko's arrival at Harvard, there were reports that Mazibuko had been approached by a grouping of DA politicians, including deputy federal chairperson Makashule Gana, who had encouraged her to challenge Zille for the DA federal leadership at the party's upcoming federal congress. Speculation in this vein escalated in April 2015, when Zille announced that she would not stand for re-election as federal leader. At the time Mazibuko released a statement saying that she would not enter the race to succeed Zille and would make her re-entry to politics "when the time is right". Mmusi Maimane, who had succeeded Mazibuko as the party's parliamentary leader, went on to be elected as federal leader.

Meanwhile, Mazibuko remained ambivalent about returning to frontline politics. In 2018, launching the Apolitical Academy, she said of such a return that, "I'm waiting for the right time, but I'm not biding that time"; she said that she preferred to change the status quo than to return to party politics and merely "feel miserable about the status quo". She also became increasingly critical of her former party, the DA. In 2016 she had famously remarked upon the dominance of white men in what she called the DA's "brains trust", describing the party's leading strategists as "highly disconnected men callously strutting about social media like a law unto themselves". By 2018, she said that she was no longer a formal member of the DA, though she still considered herself a DA supporter.

After Maimane resigned from the party leadership in 2019, she warned that his departure – and the departure of other black politicians like Herman Mashaba – reflected the paucity of the party's internal democracy and demonstrated that the DA was "captured by a certain faction". She was a vocal critic of Maimane's successor, John Steenhuisen; in October 2021 she told Eusebius McKaiser that she and Steenhuisen had formerly been friends but that, since becoming DA leader, he had become "someone who lives in an echo chamber and does not let in people with contrary views", and in March 2023 she condemned the "tone deaf, power drunk, ignorant hubris of current leadership" in the DA.

Further reading

• Pressly, Donwald (2013). Owning the Future: Mazibuko and the Changing Face of the DA. Kwela Books, Cape Town, ISBN 9780795706240.

External links

• Ms Lindiwe Desire Mazibuko at People's Assembly
• Lindiwe Mazibuko on the Muck Rack journalist listing site
• "The power of democracy" at TEDxOxford