Panyaza Lesufi

After the end of apartheid in 1994, Lesufi held several positions in public administration under the new government formed by the ANC. When the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality was established in 2000, he was appointed spokesperson to its inaugural mayor, Bavumile Vilakazi.[3] He was later a spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority.[4] He served on a task team appointed by the national Minister of Social Development, Zola Skweyiya, to establish the South African Social Security Agency, launched in 2005, and worked for the Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa, in connection with the establishment of the Hawks in 2008.[1]

After the 2009 general election, he became an advisor to Gauteng politician Angie Motshekga, who was newly appointed as the inaugural Minister of Basic Education.[4][5] In July 2009, he was offered, but turned down, the position of Ekurhuleni municipal manager; he said he had declined due to his "other commitments in national government", and sources told the Sowetan that he had declined because of his loyalty to Motshekga.[4] In July 2011, he was appointed head of communications and spokesperson in the Department of Basic Education;[6] the National Press Club named him Media Liaison Officer of the Year 2012.[7] In late March 2014, he was appointed for a month as acting director-general in the department, again working under Minister Motshekga.[5]

In the 2014 general election, Lesufi was elected as a Member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature, ranked tenth on the ANC's party list.[8] He was named Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Education in the provincial government of Gauteng Premier David Makhura.[1]

He was re-elected to the legislature in the 2019 general election, this time ranked second on the ANC's party list.[8] In May, in a post-election cabinet reshuffle, Makhura appointed Lesufi as MEC for Finance and e-Government.[9] A day after the new MECs were sworn in, however, Makhura reinstated Lesufi as MEC for Education and Youth Development, saying that he was responding to public calls – "from society, the education sector and the movement in general" – to keep Lesufi for a second term in the education portfolio, where he was popular.[10][11][12][13] Basic Education Minister Motshekga had also expressed her view that it would be "a big mistake" to move Lesufi from the education portfolio.[14]

From November 2019 to June 2020, Lesufi served simultaneously as acting MEC for Social Development, until Nomathemba Mokgethi was appointed to replace the late Thuliswa Nkabinde-Khawe.[15][16]

Eight years later, however, in June 2018, he was elected Deputy Provincial Chairperson of the ANC in Gauteng; the conference also elected Makhura as Provincial Chairperson.[18][19] Lesufi won the position narrowly, beating another MEC, Lebogang Maile, by only 22 votes, earning 623 votes to Maile's 601.[20] According to the Mail & Guardian, he secured the position by collaborating with Parks Tau, who was reportedly Makhura's favourite deputy; Tau withdrew from the deputy chair race and was instead elected Provincial Treasurer, apparently on the basis of an agreement with Lesufi's supporters.[21]

Makhura served only one term as ANC Provincial Chairperson and did not stand for re-election in 2022.[22] Lesufi entered the contest to succeed him, again opposing Lebogang Maile. On 27 June 2022, at the provincial conference in Benoni, Lesufi was elected Provincial Chairperson of the Gauteng ANC, receiving 575 votes to Maile's 543.[23] His running mate, finance MEC Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, was elected as his deputy.[24]

As of 2021, Lesufi was also a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP), the ANC's close partner in the Tripartite Alliance.[25][8][26]

While Lesufi was MEC for Education, opposition parties accused him of waging a "war on Afrikaans".[30][31][32] This stemmed from Lesufi's policy of converting Afrikaans-medium public schools into English-medium or dual-medium schools, and became an issue as early as 2015, when it was leaked that the Gauteng Department of Education was conducting a study of "underutilised" schools in the province with an eye to ameliorating school overcrowding.[33] The study proposed that public schools should be obliged to reconfigure their admissions policies to prioritise access to education over their own language policies and other internal admissions criteria.[33] Lesufi argued that many single-medium schools, especially Afrikaans-medium schools, did not have full classes but would not admit pupils who did not speak Afrikaans, while English-medium schools were overcrowded.[33] He also linked his policy to the principle of non-racialism and the constitutional right to education, claiming that Afrikaans-medium schools used language as a pretext for excluding non-white students and thereby retarded equity and post-apartheid transformation in the public education sector.[33][34]

Lesufi's policy was opposed by the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools,[33] Afriforum,[35] and Freedom Front Plus,[36] which demanded the right of schools to determine their own language policies and to preserve Afrikaans as a medium of instruction.[37] In January 2018, Hoërskool Overvaal, an Afrikaans high school in Vereeniging, took the Gauteng Department of Education to court after the department placed 55 English-speaking children at the school for the 2018 school year. The school governing body argued that the school was already full and that it could not afford to hire English-speaking teachers for the benefit of a small group of students.[26] The Pretoria High Court ruled in the school's favour, agreeing that it was unreasonable to expect the school to make provision for English instruction on such short notice.[26] The department appealed the ruling in the Constitutional Court, which dismissed it on the grounds that it had no prospect of success.[38]

Also in 2018, the Citizen reported that the Gauteng Department of Education, under Lesufi, had converted 119 Afrikaans- or dual-medium schools to English-medium schools.[30] Afriforum claimed that Lesufi was discriminating against Afrikaans schools, which it said provided a particularly important service to coloured children.[32] The Freedom Front additionally argued that Afrikaans-medium schools were marginal to the issue of access to education, since only 6% of public schools were Afrikaans-speaking; instead, it proposed that the overcrowding problem was caused by Lesufi's "incompetence".[39]

The debate was reignited in 2022 when the national government published the draft Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill, which it intended to introduce in the National Assembly. The bill would reduce the powers of school governing bodies in determining schools' language and admission policies, insofar as those policies would have to be approved by the provincial government, including on criteria related to equity and "effective use" of school resources. Opposition groups, including the DA, opposed the bill as an unjustifiable intrusion of the state into the remit of governing bodies.[31][34] Afriforum claimed that Lesufi intended to use the legislation to eliminate all Afrikaans-speaking schools and make them multilingual.[31][36] Lesufi pointed out that the bill proposed a national law, based on the policy of the national government, and did not emanate from his department.[40]

In 2021, Lesufi endorsed a traditional Chinese remedy, Lianhua Qingwen capsules, as a treatment for COVID-19; the remedy had been described by the American Food and Drug Administration as "fraudulent".[41] Lesufi's spokesperson denied that his remarks about the pills, which circulated in a video on WhatsApp, had been intended as a public or commercial endorsement.[41]

Also during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gauteng Department of Education under Lesufi's stewardship allegedly spent more than R431-million on sanitising or "decontaminating" public schools between June and August 2020. This claim was first reported in 2021 by the Daily Maverick, which also claimed that the deep cleaning programme was not required by government guidelines and had partly been carried out by companies which appeared to have little experience in cleaning.[42] Lesufi said that he had not been aware of the deep cleaning programme and would seek to hold accountable the department employees who had been responsible for signing the relevant contracts.[43]