Ayanda Dlodlo (born 22 May 1963) is a South African politician and former cabinet minister. A former member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, she became a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress (ANC) in 2009. Thereafter, she was appointed Minister of Communications (2017), Minister of Home Affairs (2017–2018), Minister of Public Service and Administration (2018–2019, 2021–2022), and Minister of State Security (2019–2021).
Dlodlo is known for having been responsible for the state security portfolio during the 2021 civil unrest in South Africa, and has also been a member of the ANC National Executive Committee since 2007. In April 2022, she resigned from government to take up a directorship at the World Bank.
Early life
Dlodlo was born in her grandmother's house in Soweto, Gauteng in South Africa, and had one sibling, a sister. Her mother was a student nurse and her father was studying toward a Bachelor of Science; he later earned an education degree and became a school principal. While Dlodlo was a toddler, her family moved to neighbouring Swaziland, a self-imposed exile to avoid South Africa's apartheid system and especially the Bantu education system. She attended a private school in Swaziland until, when she was a teenager, her parents divorced, and she and her mother returned to Johannesburg. Shortly afterwards, in 1980, Dlodlo – then aged 17 – decided to leave South Africa again to join Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC).
She received MK military training in Angola and later received military intelligence training in the Soviet Union. Her work with MK included, in the first half of the 1980s, leading a unit which was responsible for infiltrating MK operatives across the Swazi border into Natal. In 1990, she was elected head of the youth section of the ANC for England and Northern Ireland; she was abroad in order to pursue postgraduate studies at the London Institute of Shipping. She ultimately earned a higher certificate in shipping and transport management (1990), a postgraduate diploma in business management (2017), and a Master of Business Administration (2020).
Dlodlo remained in exile with the ANC until 1994, when apartheid was formally abolished. Upon her return, she learned that her sister, during her absence, had been killed by apartheid security forces, and that her mother had been traumatised by detention and torture.
Career in business
Dlodlo's first post-apartheid job was at Portnet. In her subsequent career in the private sector, she worked at the South African National Ports Authority and South African Freight Rail Company, and also worked on special assignments for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Associated British Ports. In 2014, she said that she had been a director or shareholder in at least 36 companies over the course of her career – including Rosschef Africa, the Wired Cloud, and Women in Energy – although she claimed to have resigned most of those positions when she joined the government.
Dlodlo was also director of a company called VIP Consulting Engineers, during the period in which the company had sanitation contracts with the government in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng. Because the company never fulfilled the contract, the National Treasury blacklisted the company and all its directors, including Dlodlo, restricting them from doing business with any level of government for five years between July 2012 and 2017. By the time the blacklisting came into effect in 2012, Dlodlo was working in the national government and had resigned from the company.
Career in government
Dlodlo was director of strategic operations at the Directorate of Special Operations, commonly known as the Scorpions, a specialised unit in the National Prosecuting Authority, but resigned in 2004. After her resignation, she was investigated and then indicted on charges of fraud and theft relating to her work at the Scorpions between 2003 and 2004: she was alleged to have stolen some amount (disputed in various reports) from a confidential NPA fund and to have fraudulently inflated a payment to an informant by R30,000. She was arrested in October 2006, but the charges against her were dropped in May 2007; she said she had expected it, given that the charges were "laughable".
Dlodlo resigned from the Scorpions in 2004 to join the Gauteng provincial government, and became head of the provincial Department of Safety and Security.