Samson Gwede Mantashe (born 21 June 1955) is a South African politician and former trade unionist who is currently serving as the Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources. He has been responsible for the mineral resources portfolio since February 2018, formerly as Minister of Mineral Resources from February 2018 to May 2019 and then as Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy from May 2019 to June 2024. He is also serving his second term as the national chairperson of the African National Congress (ANC).
Born in the Eastern Cape, Mantashe rose to political prominence through the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which he joined at his workplace at Matla Colliery. He rose through the union's ranks, becoming a full-time organiser in 1988 and then deputising Kgalema Motlanthe as the NUM's assistant general secretary from 1994 to 1998. He succeeded Motlanthe as general secretary from 1998 to 2006. During this period, he was also an influential member of the Central Committee and Politburo of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
After he ceded his union office to Frans Baleni in May 2006, Mantashe worked briefly at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. At the ANC's 52nd National Conference in Polokwane in December 2007, he was elected as secretary-general of the ANC, a full-time position which he held for a decade, gaining re-election in December 2012. He served concurrently as national chairperson of the SACP from 2007 to 2012. During his tenure as ANC secretary-general, he had a controversial role in defending President Jacob Zuma against internal dissent and allegations of state capture.
After two terms as secretary-general, Mantashe was elected as ANC national chairperson at the party's 54th National Conference in December 2017. President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed him to the cabinet shortly thereafter, with his portfolio enlarged after the 2019 general election and then shrunk again after the 2024 general election. His public-facing work as minister has been dominated by the ongoing energy crisis in South Africa and by proposals for a so-called just energy transition. In that context, Mantashe has been criticised for his overt interest in coal, natural gas, and powerships, arguably at the expense of investment in renewable energy sources. He was elected to a second term as ANC national chairperson in December 2022, by then an important political ally of President Ramaphosa.
In August 2025 he was removed from the SACP Central Committee, but he remains a member.
Early life and education Mantashe was born on 21 June 1955 in Lower Cala, a village in the Transkei region of the former Cape Province. He attended Matanzima High School in Cala, where his classmate Enoch Godongwana said he was "a noisemaker, even then". He became politically active in his youth as an activist in the Student Christian Movement.
He attended university after the end of apartheid, completing a Bachelor of Commerce in 1997 and an Honours in 2002, both at the University of South Africa. He also holds a Master's degree in industrial sociology from the University of the Witwatersrand, completed in 2008, and a Master of Business Administration from the Management College of Southern Africa, completed in 2021.
Early trade union career For 13 years, Mantashe worked above-ground in mining in the Cape Province and Transvaal, beginning in 1975 with a brief stint as a recreation officer at Western Deep Levels, an Anglo American gold mine in Carletonville, Transvaal. From later in 1975 until 1982, he was the welfare officer at Prieska Copper Mines outside Kimberley in the Cape Province. Then, in 1982, he moved to the Matla Colliery in the Eastern Transvaal, where he co-founded the Witbank branch of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), a national union newly established under the leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa.
He was chairperson of the Witbank branch from 1982 to 1984, and in 1985 he was elected as regional secretary. In 1987, he stood for election as assistant general secretary of the national NUM but lost narrowly to Marcel Golding, who received 572 votes to his 552. The following year, he became a professional unionist, working as a national organiser for the NUM until he was promoted to regional coordinator in 1993.
In 1994, in a contest against Archie Palane, he won election as assistant general secretary, deputising Ramaphosa's successor, Kgalema Motlanthe. During his term in that office, he also served part-time in the post-apartheid government as a local councillor in Ekurhuleni from 1994 to 1999. In addition, in 1995, he was appointed to the board of directors of Samancor, a chrome producer listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. This was an unusual move for a trade unionist at the time – it made national headlines – and Mantashe explained that it represented a shift in industrial relations away from "confrontation" and towards "meaningful influence" by workers over corporate decision-making.
NUM general secretary: 1998–2006 After four years as assistant general secretary, Mantashe was elected in 1998 to succeed Motlanthe as general secretary. Motlanthe had stepped down after his election as the secretary-general of the African National Congress (ANC).
According to Raphaël Botiveau's history of the NUM, Mantashe's eight-year tenure was notable for his emphasis on discipline and democratic centralism as organising principles, as well as for increasingly sophisticated bureaucratic management. In Botiveau's assessment, Mantashe made the NUM "more organised and disciplined than it had ever been" and "turned it into a powerful machine". Early in his tenure, Joseph Mathunjwa was expelled from the NUM and established a breakaway union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.
Tripartite Alliance During Mantashe's leadership of the union, the NUM was the largest affiliate of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which was linked to the South African Communist Party (SACP) by way of the Tripartite Alliance. Mantashe had been a member of the SACP Central Committee and Politburo since 1995. Indeed, his critics said that, under his leadership, the NUM became uncomfortably close to the SACP. He was also a member of the ANC, Cosatu's other Tripartite Alliance partner. At the ANC's 51st National Conference in December 2002, he was nominated to stand for election to the ANC National Executive Committee, but he was not elected.
Succession and aftermath Mantashe stepped down from the NUM leadership at the union's 12th national conference in May 2006. He was succeeded by Frans Baleni, who was viewed as his protégé. After that, he served two years as executive manager for strategic initiatives at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, where he was also the chairperson of the technical working group of the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition.
A year after leaving the NUM, in July 2007, Mantashe was elected unopposed to succeed Charles Nqakula as national chairperson of the SACP. He served under general secretary Blade Nzimande, with Ncumisa Kondlo as his deputy. Within six weeks of his SACP election, he had emerged as a frontrunner for election to higher ANC office too.
ANC secretary-general: 2007–2017 At the ANC's 52nd National Conference, held in December 2007 in Polokwane, Mantashe was elected as ANC secretary-general. He succeeded Kgalema Motlanthe, who was also his predecessor at the NUM. He had stood on a slate of candidates aligned to successful presidential candidate Jacob Zuma; their slate had been endorsed by Cosatu and by the ANC Youth League. The opposing candidate, Mosiuoa Lekota, stood on a slate aligned to outgoing president Thabo Mbeki; Mantashe received 2,378 votes to Lekota's 1,432.
Among his first tasks upon taking office was managing the fall-out from the 52nd National Conference, which intensified divisions between supporters of Mbeki and supporters of Zuma. In September 2008, it was Mantashe who announced that the ANC National Executive Committee had decided to "recall" Mbeki from his office as President of South Africa. In the aftermath, when Lekota and Sam Shilowa broke away from the ANC to establish the Congress of the People (COPE), Mantashe oversaw the ANC's programme to compete with COPE and recoup support lost to the new party in the 2009 general election. In the summation of journalist Stephen Grootes, "What threatened to become a split [in the ANC] became only a splinter", which Grootes credited partly to Mantashe's management of the situation.
Mantashe was re-elected to a second term at the 53rd National Conference in Mangaung in December 2012. On that occasion, again running alongside Zuma, he beat Fikile Mbalula in a landslide, receiving 3,058 votes against Mbalula's 908.
SACP chairmanship In tandem with his ANC responsibilities, Mantashe served the remainder of his five-year term as SACP national chairperson, although his dual roles sometimes caused tensions in the Tripartite Alliance. In December 2009, supporters of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema called for Mantashe to choose between the two positions after Malema and Tony Yengeni were booed at an SACP gathering in Polokwane. The ANC Youth League accused Mantashe of failing to defend Malema, as they argued the ANC secretary-general should, because his dual roles gave rise to a conflict of interest. Irvin Jim of the National Union of Metalworkers defended Mantashe, saying that Malema had taken an "anti-Cosatu and anti-SACP posture, a stance that is unprovoked" and that "Mantashe is being singled out and targeted because he is a communist".
At the next SACP congress, held at the University of Zululand in July 2012, Mantashe declined a nomination to stand for re-election as chairperson. In his outgoing speech to the congress, he said that he was stepping down on practical grounds, saying, "Being an official in both parties is just impossible. It leads a person to be an absentee chairperson in the party. That is a disservice to the party". However, he said he was "grateful" for the experience, having gained "a broader horizon from which we could observe each individual component of our revolution" and emerged with "a deeper understanding of the contradictions in the movement".
Senzeni Zokwana, also of the NUM, was elected to succeed him as chairperson, and he was elected to return as an ordinary member of the SACP Central Committee; he received the most votes of any candidate. He was also re-elected to the Central Committee at the next congress in 2017, though from 2017 onwards he dropped off the party's politburo.
Defence of Jacob Zuma The post of secretary-general was based full-time out of ANC headquarters at Luthuli House in Johannesburg, and Mantashe – despite financial difficulties in the ANC during his tenure – was viewed as wielding particular power in the office, especially during his second term. Described by the Mail & Guardian as "cantankerous", he was renowned among journalists for telephoning them to remonstrate about their reporting. Richard Calland labelled him "the ultimate political traffic warden inside and outside the ANC". His tenure lasted throughout Zuma's two terms in the national presidency, which were marred by allegations that his administration had been captured by business interests. Mantashe's critics alleged that he was a key figure in the ANC's efforts to shield Zuma from accountability. In 2013, for example, after the notorious Waterkloof Air Base landing, Mantashe maintained that the nature of Zuma's relationship with the Gupta family was not ANC business.