Gwede Mantashe

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 Resources and Energy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

After two terms as secretary-general, Mantashe was elected as ANC national chairperson at the party's 54th National Conference in December 2017.

He was Minister of Mineral Resources from February 2018 to May 2019, when his current portfolio was created.

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.

President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed him to the cabinet shortly thereafter, with his portfolio enlarged after the 2019 general election.

His public-facing work as Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy 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, and he remains a member of the SACP Central Committee.