ANC National Elective Conference: Who is Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma?
The African National Congress (ANC) is set to decide on their next
president at the party’s national conference in Nasrec.
ANC MP Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is one of the frontrunners – but who is she?
Like her main rival, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, Dlamini-Zuma has an impressive CV as an anti-apartheid activist.
Dlamini-Zuma is three years older than Ramaphosa. She was born in Kwa-Zulu Natal on 27 January 1949 and is the eldest of eight children.
Her political activism started in the early 1970s where she became elected as the South African Student Organisation’s (SASO) deputy president. In 1972, the same year she got elected in the latter position, Dlamini-Zuma was exiled, subsequently finishing her studies in Medicine at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1978.
Shortly after returning back to South Africa post her studies in the UK, Dlamini-Zuma worked as a doctor at the Mbabane Government Hospital in Swaziland, where she reportedly met her ex-husband Jacob Zuma.
In 1985, Dlamini-Zuma returned to the UK to further her studies, this time completing a diploma in tropical child health at Liverpool University’s School of Tropical Medicine. After acquiring her diploma she once more returned to the ANC to form part of the Regional Health Committee before accepting a position as a director of a British non-governmental organisation.
Dlamini-Zuma was also a part of the negotiators that enabled South Africa’s democratic transition.
The University of the Witswatersrand School of Governance Professor, Susan Booysen says Dlamini-Zuma’s negotiating role in 1992 as part of the Gender Advisory Committee during the Convention for Democratic South Africa (CODESA) might be considered pioneering, but that’s not to say the progressive gender politics she may enjoy as a female presidential hopeful go unscrutinised.
Instead Booysen says her leadership credentials – controversial or not – should speak for themselves.
Dlamini-Zuma served as cabinet minister for all South Africa’s democratically elected Presidents.
She was Minister of Health from 1994-99, under Nelson Mandela, Minister of Foreign Affairs under Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe as well as Home Affairs Minister during President Zuma’s first term of office.
In 2012, she was elected as the chairperson of the African Union (AU) Commission, making her the first woman to lead the organisation.
However, her AU Commission tenure was considered disappointing by many. Booysen suggests she missed out on many opportunities to galvanise important change in the continent’s political climate, particularly in Zimbabwe.