Despite her ranking as one of the more prominent and most highly-regarded women in the African National Congress caucus, Brigitte Mabandla’s appointment as Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture, Science and Technology has come as a surprise.
Mabandla, a constitutional and human rights lawyer, has no experience in either the arts or the technology world. According to sources, she had been earmarked for a judicial post on the Human Rights Commission, which would have meant a retirement from party politics and parliament.
She has played an active and important role in the parliamentary standing committee on justice, and her academic work on gender issues, particularly customary law, has been significant. She is regarded as intellectually sharp, politically astute, and very outspoken, with a strong humanist bent.
One parliamentary source close to Nelson Mandela noted that the president had personally chosen her and requested her to take up the deputy ministership.
Other contenders included Arts and Culture, Science and Technology Standing Commitee chairman Wally Serote and recently-resigned Womens’ League executive member Baleka Kgositsile.
Serote, however, is believed to have been rejected because of his controversial status in the arts community; he is also reported to prefer his role as standing committee chair.
And even though Kgositsile — a personal favourite of the president — would have been an obvious choice, given her background in the arts (she is a poet and long active in the arts and culture section of the African National Congress), sources close to the President believe that he might have passed her over because of the clash between her and Winnie Mandela in the ANC Womens’ League.
“Replacing Winnie with one of the women whom she percieves to have caused much of the present trouble by resigning from the League would have been cruel and would have caused an additional ruckus,” said one