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South African official opposition elects black woman to lead it in parliament

South Africa's official opposition party has made history by electing a black woman to lead it in parliament for the first time. Democratic Alliance new parliament leader Lindiwe Mazibuko Photo: AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam 
3:54PM BST 27 Oct 2011


Lindiwe Mazibuko, 31, said she hoped to spearhead the party's challenge to the virtual one-party rule of the African National Congress at elections in 2014.

Previously the Democratic Alliance's national spokesman with just two years in parliament under her belt, she won the backing of several influential colleagues to comfortably beat the 47-year-old white incumbent, a former sheep farmer.

The Democratic Alliance has its roots in the white liberal struggle against apartheid and has battled since the arrival of democracy in 1994 to shake off its image as the party of the pale-skinned.

But disaffection with the ANC is growing amid widespread corruption and cronyism and a failure to markedly improve lives for the unemployed, poorly educated and impoverished.

In local elections earlier this year, anger over a scarcity of basic services such as running water and electricity for many South Africans living in the country's townships saw the Democratic Alliance take votes from the ruling party in every province but one.


It will be many years before anyone can wrest power from the ANC, which won the last election with 70 per cent of the vote.

But the DA is hoping that Miss Mazibuko's youth and colour will help them erode that majority in a country where more than three quarters of the population is black and two thirds is under the age of 35.

Speaking after the vote yesterday in parliament in Cape Town, which has been run by the DA since 2006, Miss Mazibuko said she welcomed the challenge of breaking ANC domination all over the country.

"I am incredibly excited about the future of South Africa and the role that the Democratic Alliance will play in ensuring that every citizen is given a chance to lead a life they value," she said.

"We have to actualise the hopes and the fears of voters. We must become a party that has the will, that has the plan. And the principled platform from which we can do that is parliament."

Helen Zille, the party's national leader, said her new second-in-command would upend the ANC's claim that the only people to criticise them were white.

"We have crossed the first Rubicon," Miss Zille, a former anti-apartheid activist and Cape Town mayor, said. "We are on course for 2014 and 2019."

Miss Mazibuko has faced derision from her opponents. Julius Malema, the ANC's outspoken youth league leader, dismissed her as "the tea girl of the madam".

South Africa's communist party chief, Blade Nzimande, suggested she was a "coconut", black in appearance but white on the inside. 

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