57 Facts About Lindiwe Mazibuko

Lindiwe Mazibuko served in the National Assembly through the Fifth Parliament but resigned in May 2014.

Lindiwe Mazibuko held that position for two-and-a-half years, working alongside DA federal leader Helen Zille.

Lindiwe Mazibuko was born on 9 April 1980 in Manzini, Swaziland to South African parents of Zulu heritage.

Lindiwe Mazibuko's father was a banker and her mother was a nurse; her grandfather had lived in Swaziland, where he was an Anglican bishop.

When Lindiwe Mazibuko was aged six, her family returned to South Africa, moving to Umlazi, a township outside Durban in the former Natal Province.

Lindiwe Mazibuko had gone on international tours as a singer in her school choir, and she hoped to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama but wasn't able to afford it.

In 2007, Lindiwe Mazibuko wrote her Honours thesis on the Democratic Alliance, intrigued by Helen Zille's recent ascension to replace Tony Leon as DA leader.

Lindiwe Mazibuko later said that both she and her family were surprised to find her in agreement with the DA: the only political statement she had ever seen her father make was calling amandla to Nelson Mandela, and she felt that there was a presumption that black South Africans should support Mandela's African National Congress.

However, Lindiwe Mazibuko felt that she "could no longer in good conscience" support the ANC under President Thabo Mbeki.

Shortly after she completed her thesis and graduated, Lindiwe Mazibuko was hired as a researcher in the DA's parliamentary caucus, having responded to a job advert in the Sunday Times.

Pursuant to the April 2009 election, Lindiwe Mazibuko secured election to a seat in the National Assembly, the lower house of the South African Parliament, and was assigned to the DA's constituency office in North Durban.

Tim Harris, Lindiwe Mazibuko's colleague, said that she benefitted from "a real ability to construct convincing arguments at speed".

Ahead of the regular internal midterm election in the DA's parliamentary caucus, Lindiwe Mazibuko announced that she would challenge Trollip, a white DA stalwart and the party's provincial leader in the Eastern Cape, for the position of DA parliamentary leader and Leader of the Opposition.

Lindiwe Mazibuko announced her candidacy during a press conference in Cape Town on 27 September 2011, flanked by her two running mates; Wilmot James would stand for the caucus chairperson position and Watty Watson would stand to become the party's new chief whip.

Lindiwe Mazibuko said that the trio collectively represented the best of the DA: "a combination of experience, expertise, and a vibrant new vision for the future".

In something of a departure from precedent, the campaign was overtly public, rather than confined to internal appeals to other parliamentarians; Lindiwe Mazibuko later said that she taken this approach intentionally, hoping to foster a culture of more democratic leadership selection in the DA.

Lindiwe Mazibuko said that the differences between her and Trollip were "methodological" rather than ideological or policy-related, and the primary theme of her campaign was the DA's need for a younger, more energetic, and more racially representative leadership.

Lindiwe Mazibuko's candidacy was linked to a group of DA prodigies around Ryan Coetzee, a DA strategist who had become one of the foremost proponents of diversifying and modernising the party.

Lindiwe Mazibuko retained Trollip's shadow cabinet until February 2012, when she announced a reshuffle of the shadow cabinet.

In November 2012, Lindiwe Mazibuko announced that she would table a parliamentary motion of no confidence in Zuma and his cabinet on behalf of the DA and other opposition parties.

Lindiwe Mazibuko led the consortium of opposition parties to the Western Cape High Court, where they attempted to force the Speaker of the National Assembly, Max Sisulu, to break the deadlock and permit a debate.

However, by the time new rules were passed in February 2014, Lindiwe Mazibuko had abandoned her original motion of no confidence, saying instead that she would seek to use Parliament's stronger power of impeachment.

Lindiwe Mazibuko was the DA's first black parliamentary leader and South Africa's first black Leader of the Opposition, and her election received international attention.

Lindiwe Mazibuko attended the 8th Women's Forum for the Economy and Society in 2012 as a "Rising Talent".

Inside South Africa Lindiwe Mazibuko was frequently derided and undermined by opposing politicians.

Lindiwe Mazibuko's racial identity was a common point of derision, with critics suggesting that her educational and class background undermined her claim to a genuine or representative black identity.

In December 2013, when Lindiwe Mazibuko appeared on a special South African edition of the BBC's Question Time, she was called a "house nigger" by another panel member, Andile Mngxitama.

The overall ANC caucus accused Lindiwe Mazibuko of being dressed in an "inappropriate manner" in an official statement released by the office of the Chief Whip of the National Assembly.

Some observers suggested that the ANC's dismissive attitude towards Lindiwe Mazibuko gave her a political advantage.

Zille later said that Lindiwe Mazibuko's elevation had been premature, describing her as a talented politician but hindered by inexperience.

Lindiwe Mazibuko suggested that Mazibuko's political effectiveness had been hindered by her reputation as Zille's protege.

Lindiwe Mazibuko excoriated the caucus in an email to Mazibuko and other caucus leaders, which was leaked to the press.

Lindiwe Mazibuko nonetheless told the press that she continued to support the legislation and race-based affirmative action more broadly.

Lindiwe Mazibuko said that both were compatible with the DA's liberalism, arguing that, "The two tenets of liberalism are individual freedom and social responsibility".

Zille later said that Lindiwe Mazibuko had told her to "butt out of caucus affairs".

In Zille's account, published in Not Without A Fight, her relationship with Lindiwe Mazibuko deteriorated because of Lindiwe Mazibuko's ambitions to replace her as DA federal leader.

In particular, she accused Lindiwe Mazibuko of undermining the relationship by erecting a "Berlin Wall" between her parliamentary office and Zille's party office; among other things, Zille said that she attempted to centralise party communications in her office, cancelled joint press conferences with Zille, refused to share an office with Zille in the Houses of Parliament, and refused to work with Zille's chief of staff, Geordin Hill-Lewis.

Lindiwe Mazibuko was briefly absent from the election campaign in March 2014 while recovering from an emergency surgery, but she returned to work in April.

On 10 May 2014, the Electoral Commission released the results of the election, which were positive for the DA and which would allow Lindiwe Mazibuko to carry on as Leader of the Opposition.

However, the following day, the Sunday Times published an exclusive interview in which Lindiwe Mazibuko announced that she would decline to return to her seat in the new parliamentary term.

Lindiwe Mazibuko said that she was taking a sabbatical from politics to complete a one-year mid-career master's degree at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Lindiwe Mazibuko, who said that she would remain a DA member, denied that the party's internal politics had influenced her design to resign.

Former DA strategist Gareth van Onselen published an article entitled "The real reasons Lindiwe Mazibuko left the DA parliamentary leadership", which claimed that Lindiwe Mazibuko had been "viciously and brutally maligned and alienated" by Zille's allies and that she had become particularly marginalised as Maimane rose in Zille's favour.

Gavin Davis, the DA's communications director, implied that Lindiwe Mazibuko had perpetuated this account of events, pointing out that she was close to van Onselen and had not publicly refuted his claims.

Conversely to van Onselen's account, Zille and her supporters suggested that Lindiwe Mazibuko was leaving due to her own declining popularity in the DA caucus.

Zille told Die Burger that Lindiwe Mazibuko was pursuing her "Plan B", Harvard, in the knowledge that she would have lost her office anyway if she stood for re-election as the DA's parliamentary leader.

Lindiwe Mazibuko later complained about the manner in which Mazibuko had "stage-managed" her resignation announcement.

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.

Lindiwe Mazibuko spent the second half of 2015 as a resident fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, where she convened a reading group on institution-building in post-conflict democratic transitions.

In 2018 Lindiwe 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, Lindiwe 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 Lindiwe Mazibuko became its chief executive officer.

Lindiwe Mazibuko writes a weekly column for the South African Sunday Times.

At the time Lindiwe 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".

In later years, Lindiwe Mazibuko remained ambivalent about returning to frontline politics.

Lindiwe Mazibuko became increasingly critical of her former party, the DA.

Lindiwe Mazibuko speaks Zulu and Swati as well as English.