Zola Skweyiya
Powerful voice behind the scenes
● Zola Skweyiya, who died in Tshwane three days before his 76th birthday, was a senior cabinet minister in the Mandela and Mbeki governments for 15 years before being appointed South Africa’s high commissioner to the UK.
As the minister of social development from 1999 to 2009, he expanded South Africa’s social welfare system to the point where nearly a third of households lived primarily on state handouts.
Within two years of his being appointed by president Thabo Mbeki, there were 3.4 million beneficiaries. By 2006 this number had grown to 10.9 million. A year later it increased to
12.8 million.
Under him the proportion of the state budget devoted to welfare grew from 10% to 17%. Child support grants grew from fewer than a million when he became minister to more than seven million within five years, and he extended the age cap from seven to 14 years.
A research project Skweyiya commissioned in 2006 found that 36% of households were receiving social grants. Without these grants, the survey found, 94% of recipient households would be living below the poverty line, unable to cover their most basic food costs.
He was accused of pandering to populism and creating a culture of dependency. He retorted that such criticism came from those who had never experienced real hunger. He said his goal was to ensure that no child went to bed hungry.
The system grew too quickly for him to establish adequate checks and balances. It was subject to widespread abuse and massive corruption.
At one point he called in the police and
300 000 grants were cancelled, including 12 000 that were being fraudulently collected by government officials.
Skweyiya was one of the more competent and quietly outspoken members of Mbeki’s cabinet.
He was one of a small minority of ministers who advocated that Mbeki should withdraw from the HIV/Aids debate. He also led criticism in the cabinet of health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, not least because his department had to deal with a spiralling number of Aids orphans.
Skweyiya was born in Simon’s Town on April 14 1942. He matriculated at Lovedale College in Alice where he was involved in school boycotts against Bantu education. He attended Fort Hare
University where he became an ANC activist. When armed struggle against apartheid was declared he was involved in mobilising support for Umkhonto weSizwe.
In 1963 he was instructed to leave the country. He joined the ANC in exile in Tanzania and then Zambia. In 1969 he was sent to East Germany where for the next 10 years he studied law and obtained a PhD.
He represented the ANC at the Organisation of African Unity until 1985, when ANC president Oliver Tambo recalled him to Lusaka to set up and lead the ANC’s department of legal and constitutional affairs.
A year later Tambo appointed him deputy chairman of a high-powered constitutional committee chaired by Jack Simons and including top legal minds such as Kader Asmal and Albie Sachs.
Its job was to come up with a bill of rights and set of constitutional guidelines that would set out the political rights South Africans could expect under an ANC government.
He later became chairman of the committee, a role for which he was well suited. He was hardworking, collegial, with an independent mind and no desire for the limelight. A man of few words, which he uttered in short, to-the-point sentences, his somewhat dour exterior hid a sharp sense of humour.
The committee played a major role in laying the groundwork for what was to become South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution.
A more formidable challenge for him was his appointment as officer of justice in the ANC in exile, a post created to enforce the ANC’s code of conduct in its prison camps in Angola where there were shocking human rights abuses. However well-intentioned he was, he was largely ineffective because the camps remained closed to him.
In 1991 he told an inquiry chaired by his brother, the future Constitutional Court Justice Thembile Skweyiya, that his efforts to visit Angola in 1986 and 1987 had been “blocked at every turn” by the then head of the security department, Mzwandile Piliso, and that he himself had been in danger of being arrested.
He was finally allowed to visit Angola late in 1988, but by then the camp inmates had been removed to Tanzania and Uganda. His efforts to visit Uganda were also blocked, and severe abuses continued unchecked well into 1991.
After returning from exile he joined the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape, where he organised a series of workshops on key constitutional questions dealing with land, socioeconomic issues and the electoral system. The consensus, and his own preference, was for a mixed proportional representation/constituency system after the first elections in 1994, but the ANC never followed through on that.
In 2016 Skweyiya joined other ANC stalwarts in calling on president Jacob Zuma to step down.
Skweyiya is survived by his second wife, Thuthukile, a son from his first marriage and two stepchildren.