Lindiwe Desire 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 served in the National Assembly through the Fourth Parliament until her resignation in May 2014.
A former DA political staffer, Mazibuko was sworn into the National Assembly following the May 2009 general election. She represented the DA in the KwaZulu-Natal constituency. From 2009 to 2011, she was the national spokesperson of the DA and served in the shadow cabinet of Athol Trollip, first as Shadow Deputy Minister of Communications from 2009 to 2010 and then as Shadow Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform from 2010 to 2011.
On 27 October 2011, after a fierce contest between Mazibuko and Trollip, the DA parliamentary caucus voted to appoint Mazibuko as the party's parliamentary leader, in which capacity she became Leader of the Opposition. She held that position for two-and-a-half years, working alongside DA federal leader Helen Zille. Although she was formerly regarded as Zille's protégé, their relationship became strained in 2013 after a disagreement over the DA's stance on black economic empowerment. As opposition leader Mazibuko sued the Speaker of the National Assembly, challenging the prevailing parliamentary rules for motions of no confidence.
After the May 2014 general election, Mazibuko resigned from the National Assembly, saying that she was taking a temporary hiatus from frontline politics to pursue postgraduate education. Thereafter she became the founder and chief executive officer of Futurelect, a non-profit organisation focused on civic education and skills development in African public service.
Early life and education Mazibuko was born on 9 April 1980 in Manzini, Swaziland to South African parents of Zulu heritage. Her father was a banker and her mother was a nurse; her grandfather had also lived in Swaziland, where he was an Anglican bishop. When Mazibuko was aged six, her family returned to South Africa, moving to Umlazi, a township outside Durban in the former Natal Province (now KwaZulu-Natal). To avoid the apartheid-era Bantu Education system, Mazibuko attended an independent Jewish primary school, Carmel College in Durban. In 1997 she matriculated at St. Mary's Diocesan School for Girls in Kloof, Durban, where she was a boarder.
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. Instead, she enrolled in a Bachelor of Music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. After a year, bored by the course, she dropped out of university and lived in Europe for several years. For a period she lived in London, England, where she worked as a waitress and pursued a singing career. Upon her return to South Africa she studied the humanities at the University of Cape Town, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in French, classics, and media studies in 2006 and Honours in political communication in 2007.
Early political career: 2008–2009 In 2007, Mazibuko wrote her Honours thesis on the Democratic Alliance (DA), intrigued by Helen Zille's recent ascension to replace Tony Leon as DA leader. During her research, Mazibuko warmed to Zille and identified with the DA's policy platform, realising that the DA "wasn't this big monster that everybody assumes it to be". In particular, she supported the DA's "unashamedly pro-poor" policy outlook.
She 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 (ANC). However, Mazibuko felt that she "could no longer in good conscience" support the ANC under President Thabo Mbeki. On the racial point, she argued in 2009 that "the DA is definitely a white party" but would only remain unrepresentative for as long as black South Africans refused to join it.
Shortly after she completed her thesis and graduated, Mazibuko was hired as a researcher in the DA's parliamentary caucus, having responded to a job advert in the Sunday Times. After less than a year as a researcher, she was appointed as the party's national media liaison officer in 2008. Later the same year, she applied to stand as a parliamentary candidate for the DA in the upcoming April 2009 general election. The Financial Mail described her as "efficient but politically untested". Labelled a "star performer" by Zille, Mazibuko was ranked third on the DA's party list in the KwaZulu-Natal constituency in 2009.
Shadow Cabinet: 2009–2011
Pursuant to the April 2009 election, 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. In the DA's post-election shadow cabinet she was appointed as Shadow Deputy Minister of Communications, under Shadow Minister Niekie van den Berg, and as the DA's new national spokesperson. The shadow cabinet was announced jointly by Zille, the DA's leader, and Athol Trollip, the DA's parliamentary leader; in an unusual arrangement, Trollip served as Leader of the Opposition in Parliament while Zille was serving in provincial government as the Premier of the Western Cape.
Within weeks of the election, Mandy Rossouw reported that Mazibuko, aged 29, was a "rising star" in the DA, regarded as the party's presumptive future leader. During the same period the Mail & Guardian named her as one of its 200 Young South Africans of 2009. Verashni Pillay said that her political rise was facilitated by her public speaking skills, thick skin and media savvy, and "a good dose of favour with a few powerful people" in the DA leadership. Tim Harris, Mazibuko's colleague, said that she benefitted from "a real ability to construct convincing arguments at speed".
In September 2010, Trollip reshuffled the shadow cabinet, retaining Mazibuko as national spokesperson while also promoting her to replace Mpowele Swathe as Shadow Minister of Rural Development, Land Reform and Poverty Alleviation; Annette Steyn was appointed as her deputy. In the next year, Mazibuko was a prominent feature in the DA's 2011 local elections campaign, and she appeared on the party's election posters alongside two senior DA leaders, Zille and Patricia de Lille.
Leader of the Opposition: 2011–2014
Election
Campaign Ahead of the regular internal midterm election in the DA's parliamentary caucus, 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. She 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. 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".
Mazibuko was commended for her strategic choice of running mates, James and Watson being experienced DA parliamentarians, and in other respects too she ran a "savvy" and professional campaign, with David Maynier as her campaign manager. In something of a departure from precedent, the campaign was overtly public, rather than confined to internal appeals to other parliamentarians; Mazibuko later said that she taken this approach intentionally, hoping to foster a culture of more democratic leadership selection in the DA.
She 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. Eusebius McKaiser argued that, Mazibuko's "infectious" enthusiasm notwithstanding, her public statements were overly focused on "vague, abstract values or responses to her identity", which he said neglected "substantive policy and intellectual detail in favour of the quick returns on a crisp sound bite".
Endorsements DA politicians who publicly endorsed Mazibuko's candidacy included James Masango, Marta Wenger, Natasha Michael, Stevens Mokgalapa, and Patricia de Lille, the Mayor of Cape Town, who said that Mazibuko had "proved herself an exceptional leader and a formidable opponent of the ANC". There were rumours that the DA's federal chairperson, James Selfe, campaigned for Mazibuko behind the scenes, urging Trollip to withdraw from the race and allow her to take office unopposed. Her candidacy was also 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. Coetzee had lost the parliamentary leadership election to Trollip in 2009, leading insiders to nickname Mazibuko's campaign as "Ryan's revenge". This factional dimension, along with the public nature of the campaign, resulted in a fierce internal contest; in her memoirs, Zille wrote that, "There was blood on the floor before a single vote had been cast".
There was also a widespread perception that Zille supported Mazibuko and even lobbied overtly on her behalf, sharing Coetzee's putative view that Mazibuko's candidacy presented an opportunity "to rid her party of the old guard". In this view Zille had groomed Mazibuko for the parliamentary leadership, propelling Mazibuko's rapid political ascent by appointing her as spokesperson and featuring her on the DA's 2011 election posters. Zille later admitted that she "used up some of my political capital at the time encouraging people to vote for Lindiwe". According to Zille, she initially discouraged Mazibuko from standing, recognising that she had the requisite "intellect and political instinct" but nonetheless believing her to lack the experience needed for the job. Conversely, Zille's critics – Masizole Mnqasela chief among them – alleged that Mazibuko's inexperience was appealing to Zille because it would make her more pliant and less of an obstacle to Zille's control of the parliamentary caucus. A Mail & Guardian editorial urged that Mazibuko "should not be used to remote control the party in Parliament. If she wins, the DA should be serious about letting her lead and not make this a cosmetic transformation."
The midterm election was held on 27 October 2011 and Mazibuko won comfortably. The vote count was not released to the public, but the Mail & Guardian reported that Mazibuko had won by a margin of about 50 votes to Trollip's 31. She retained Trollip's shadow cabinet until February 2012, when she announced a reshuffle of the shadow cabinet.
Motion of no confidence