David Masondo

David Masondo (born 14 November 1974) is a South African politician who is currently serving as Deputy Minister of Finance since May 2019.

He is also the second deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC).

Masondo was born on 11 November 1974 in Elim, a village near Makhado in the former Northern Transvaal.

He matriculated at Marimane High School in Makhado.

A member of the SACP since 1993, Masondo was first elected to the party's Central Committee in July 2007.

He was elected to a five-year term as second deputy secretary in July 2022.

After his term there, he worked at the headquarters of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which he had joined in 1993; he headed the party's political education and youth desks.

After high school, he attended Giyani College of Education, where he joined the South African Students Congress, becoming its provincial chairperson in 1996 and its national deputy president in 1997.

He went on to the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was president of the student representative council in 1998 and where he graduated with a BA, Honours, and MA.

In 1999, Masondo was appointed to the National Youth Commission.

In 2001, he was reportedly injured in a clash with campus security forces during a student protest against a visit by Colin Powell, the United States Secretary of State.

Born in Limpopo, Masondo entered politics as a student activist, serving as deputy president of the South African Students Congress and later as the provincial chairperson of the ANC Youth League from 2003 to 2005.

He rose to national prominence as the inaugural chairperson of the SACP's Young Communist League from 2003 to 2010.

By the end of his tenure in that position, he had broken ranks with the SACP's national leadership to emerge as a political opponent of President Jacob Zuma.

Because of his continued involvement in youth politics, Masondo was named by the Mail & Guardian in 2003 as one of 20 politicians who would "emerge as key figures in our public life over the next 10 years"; on several occasions in later years, he was one of the newspaper's 200 Young South Africans.

In December 2003, Masondo was elected as the inaugural chairperson of the newly re-established Young Communist League (YCL) of the SACP.

From 2003 to 2005, he was the provincial chairperson of the ANC Youth League in Limpopo, and he was later a member of the league's National Executive Committee.

He later served a stint in the provincial government of Limpopo, where he was a director in the department of local government and housing, and in 2006 he returned to Wits to pursue his PhD and work as a lecturer in political economy.

In 2006, for example, when Mazibuko Jara wrote a controversial article questioning the SACP's support for Zuma, Masondo responded in an article called Red is the Colour of our Flag: In Defence of the Rule of Law, in which he argued that Zuma's corruption trial arose primarily from "a political agenda" related to the ANC's succession battle.

Later the same year, Masondo publicly called Mbeki a "dictator" during a press conference.

Concurrently with this position, he was elected to the SACP's Central Committee for the first time at the party's 12th national congress in July 2007; he was the most popular candidate in the elections, receiving 989 votes across 1,298 ballots.

In its early years, the YCL, under the leadership of Masondo and general secretary Buti Manamela, was aligned to opponents of incumbent President Thabo Mbeki, and therefore to supporters of presidential challenger Jacob Zuma.

However, after Zuma took office as president in 2009, Masondo diverged from Manamela – and from SACP secretary general Blade Nzimande – in becoming increasingly critical of Zuma.

For example, in September 2010, he wrote an opinion piece about black economic empowerment (BEE) in City Press in which he argued:"BEE is increasingly becoming too narrow, amounting to ZEE, that is, Zuma Economic Empowerment. The recent multi-billion-rand Arcelor-Mittal BEE deal involving Duduzane, President Jacob Zuma's son, is another example of how BEE has become too narrow. Only a few can be misled to believe that there is no link between Zuma's rise to the presidency and his family's rise to riches."During the same period, in 2009, the YCL backed Julius Malema's calls for the nationalisation of the mining industry.

Asked about the likely effects of this policy for foreign direct investment, Masondo said, "Investment for what and for whom? Investors must invest on our own terms and we must have control over the dividends of our work and resources."

Masondo reportedly spoke in support of nationalisation during closed sessions of the ANC's 2010 national general council.

He remained in office as YCL chairperson until December 2010, when he stepped down at the YCL's third national congress.

He was booed by Manamela's pro-Zuma supporters at the conference, but he dismissed the heckling as part of a "general pattern of degeneration in the youth movement".

Masondo was also a member of the African National Congress (ANC), the SACP's partner in the Tripartite Alliance.

From February 2011 to May 2014, Masondo represented the ANC in the Limpopo Provincial Legislature, where he was Member of the Executive Council for Finance until July 2013 under Premier Cassel Mathale.

His department was controversially placed under national administration in December 2011.

On 28 January 2011, Masondo was appointed to the Limpopo Executive Council in a reshuffle by Premier Cassel Mathale, who named him to succeed Saa'd Cachalia as Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Provincial Treasury.

His appointment was unexpected but was presumed to be a reflection of his increasing closeness to Zuma's opponents, who included Mathale and his allies in the ANC Youth League.

In order to take up the office, he returned to South Africa from the United States and was sworn in to the Limpopo Provincial Legislature.

After Masondo had been in the treasury for less than a year, the national government announced in December 2011 that Masondo's department was one of five that was being placed under administration due to financial problems.

In 2014, he completed a PhD in sociology under the supervision of Vivek Chibber at New York University.

His dissertation, about post-apartheid automotive industrial policy in South Africa, was published in the Review of African Political Economy.

His PhD research was supported by a Ford Foundation International Fellowship.

He joined the ANC National Executive Committee in December 2017, and he has been the principal of the ANC's political school, the O. R. Tambo School of Leadership, since it was launched in 2019.

He was elected to the National Assembly in the 2019 general election, whereafter he was appointed as Deputy Minister of Finance under the second cabinet of President Cyril Ramaphosa.