David Mabuza

David Dabede Mabuza (25 August 1960 – 3 July 2025), also known as DD Mabuza, was a South African politician who served as deputy president of South Africa from February 2018 to February 2023. He was the deputy president of the African National Congress (ANC) from December 2017 to December 2022 and was previously the premier of Mpumalanga from 2009 to 2018, throughout the presidency of his onetime political ally Jacob Zuma. Mabuza served as a Member of Parliament from 2018 until his resignation in 2023. A native of rural Mpumalanga and a teacher by training, Mabuza's initial engagement in politics was through the Black Consciousness movement, while he was a student, and then through teachers' unions; he was chairperson of the South African Democratic Teachers Union, an affiliate of the influential Congress of South African Trade Unions, from 1988 to 1991. After the end of apartheid in 1994, he joined the Mpumalanga provincial legislature as an ANC representative and took up a series of ministerial posts in the Mpumalanga Executive Council. He was elected to the ANC National Executive Committee for the first time in 2007 and was ANC provincial chairperson in Mpumalanga from 2008 to 2017, throughout his premiership. Mabuza's politics during his career were described as populist. Through a rigorous recruitment drive, he increased the size and influence of the Mpumalanga branch of the ANC and, with Ace Magashule and Supra Mahumapelo, was part of the so-called Premier League that helped engineer the outcome of the ANC's 54th National Conference. At the conference, held in December 2017, Mabuza was elected Deputy President of the ANC, serving under Cyril Ramaphosa. When Ramaphosa ascended to the national presidency after Zuma's resignation in February 2018, he appointed Mabuza to succeed him as national Deputy President.