Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi

Controversially, the committee also appointed her to lead an internal task team charged with investigating the actions of the SACP's left wing during the ANC's 50th Conference.

Concurrently, she remained on the SACP Central Committee and also served on the party's politburo.

Geraldine Joslyn Fraser-Moleketi (Fraser; born 24 August 1960) is a South African politician who was the Minister of Public Service and Administration from June 1999 to September 2008.

Fraser-Moleketi was born on 24 August 1960 in Lansdowne, a suburb of Cape Town.

Her parents later moved to Faure, where her father was principal of the state children's home; during the week, she lived with her grandmother in Crossroads on the Cape Flats, in order to attend Livingstone High School in Claremont, Cape Town.

She became politically active during this period, serving on the school's student representative council and participating in Marxist reading groups.

She matriculated in 1978 and studied towards a diploma in education at the University of the Western Cape before her studies were interrupted by her anti-apartheid activism.

After the end of apartheid, she completed a Master's in public administration at the University of Pretoria, gaining admission on the basis of recognition of prior learning.

Born in Cape Town, Fraser-Moleketi joined the exiled anti-apartheid movement in the Frontline States in 1980, becoming a member of the ANC and SACP.

In 1980, Fraser-Moleketi dropped out of her second year of university and, with four other women, crossed the South African border into exile in the Frontline States, where she joined the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP).

Her first post was in Zimbabwe, where she worked under Joe Gqabi.

After Gqabi was assassinated in 1981, Zimbabwean authorities detained and questioned her.

She received military training with Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola, and she later attended specialised military courses in the Soviet Union (between 1982 and 1983) and Cuba (in 1989).

However, she spent most of her time in exile in Zambia.

From 1986 to 1990, she was seconded to work for the Lutheran World Federation.

She returned to South Africa during the negotiations to end apartheid in July 1990, ahead of the SACP's internal relaunch, and worked at the party's headquarters until the April 1994 general election, when she was elected to represent the ANC in the first post-apartheid Parliament.

For this, she became a bête noire of the left wing of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and SACP, the ANC's Tripartite Alliance partners, though she was herself a member of the SACP Central Committee between 1990 and 2002, including as deputy chairperson of the party from 1998 to 2002.

In July 1990, during the negotiations to end apartheid, she returned to South Africa at the request of the SACP to prepare for the national relaunch of the party, which had recently been unbanned.

She was elected to the SACP Central Committee later the same year.

From then until the end of 1992, she served as an SACP national administrator and as personal assistant in the office of the SACP general secretary, first under Joe Slovo and then under Chris Hani.

She was also on the management committee of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa as technical support to the SACP general secretary.

In September 1993, she was appointed as deputy elections coordinator for the ANC ahead of the upcoming April 1994 general election.

She represented the African National Congress (ANC) in the National Assembly from 1994 to 2008 and is a former deputy chairperson of the South African Communist Party (SACP).

In the 1994 election, South Africa's first under universal suffrage, Fraser-Moleketi was elected to represent the ANC in the National Assembly, the lower house of the new South African Parliament.

After less than a year as a backbencher, she was appointed to the Government of National Unity as Deputy Minister of Welfare and Population Development in February 1995; in July 1996, President Nelson Mandela promoted her to minister in the same portfolio.

After less than a year as a backbencher, she was appointed to the Government of National Unity in February 1995, named by President Nelson Mandela as Deputy Minister of Welfare and Population Development.

She deputised Abe Williams and then Patrick McKenzie, both members of the National Party.

Before that, from July 1996 to June 1999, she was Minister of Welfare and Population Development.

In May 1996, Mandela announced a major reshuffle, which would take effect after the National Party's withdrawal from the cabinet on 30 June.

Fraser-Moleketi was appointed to succeed McKenzie as Minister of Welfare and Population Development.

She remained in that office through the rest of Mandela's presidency, during which time she supported the interdepartmental campaign to consolidate a social wage.

She was also a member of the ANC National Executive Committee between 1997 and 2007.

During this period, Fraser-Moleketi joined the ANC National Executive Committee; she was elected to her first five-year term at the ANC's 50th National Conference in December 1997, ranked as the 17th-most popular member of the 60-member committee.

On 2 July 1998, at the party's 10th national congress, she was elected as SACP deputy national chairperson, serving under chairperson Charles Nqakula and general secretary Blade Nzimande.

After the 1999 general election, newly elected President Thabo Mbeki appointed her as Minister of Public Service and Administration, where she served for the duration of Mbeki's presidency.

She was best known for taking a hard-line stance during public sector wage negotiations, leading to deteriorating labour relations and public sector strikes in 1999, 2004, and 2007.

She graduated in 2006 with a thesis about public service reform in South Africa.

On 25 September 2008, Fraser-Moleketi resigned from the cabinet and from the National Assembly in response to Mbeki's resignation from the Presidency.

After leaving legislative politics, she was director for democratic governance at the United Nations Development Programme from 2009 to 2013 and then vice-president and special envoy on gender at the African Development Bank from 2013 to 2016.

She served multiple terms on the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration, and she has been the chancellor of the Nelson Mandela University since April 2018.