How top Social Development officials used late Minister’s name to falsify CVs

How do you make certain that one of your referees on your CV won’t contradict your claim of having worked for them? You list someone who died in 2021.

This appears to have been the reasoning by uncle and niece team Ngwako Kgatla and Lesedi Mabiletja, appointed as special adviser and chief of staff, respectively, to Social Development Minister Sisisi Tolashe.

Mabiletja left her post in January 2026 after Daily Maverick’s previous reporting on her lack of qualifications for the role, but Kgatla is still employed as Tolashe’s special adviser, having followed Tolashe from her previous role as Deputy Minister for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities.

This was Tolashe’s first taste of executive power – and she was appointed to the post in March 2023 after the previous deputy minister, Hlengiwe Mkhize, died of lung cancer in September 2021.

Almost three years after Mkhize’s death, Kgatla listed her name and number under “References” on his CV when applying for the post of Tolashe’s special adviser.

Kgatla responded to Daily Maverick’s questions through his lawyers, doubling down on his claim of having worked for Mkhize.

Yet, as will be seen, multiple aspects of Kgatla’s CV began to crumble when Daily Maverick began investigating – raising serious wider concerns about whether even the most basic due diligence is being done when it comes to vetting applicants for some of the most senior positions in government.

Like niece, like uncle

In September 2025, Daily Maverick revealed that 22-year-old Mabiletja had been appointed chief of staff to Minister Tolashe despite not meeting the necessary criteria, which would become the subject of a Public Service Commission (PSC) investigation report yet to be made public.

The only significant work experience listed on Mabiletja’s CV was a “3 years and 9 months” period, undated, as a “volunteer in the office of the Deputy Minister Hlengiwe Mkhize providing assistance to the Head of Office/Private Secretary”.

The CV proceeded to list nine bullet points detailing the varied tasks carried out by Mabiletja in this role, including: “We hosted visitors and I would be the one to administer that process”.

All of this was a lie, Daily Maverick has established.

Mkhize’s head of office Lebogang Mothibe, who worked with Deputy Minister Mkhize from 2014 to her death in 2021, responded to Daily Maverick’s questions about Mabiletja without hesitation: “I do not know this person.”

Mkhize’s daughter, Dr Zinzi Mkhize, who was extremely close to her late mother, similarly told Daily Maverick that she had no recollection of such a person in her mother’s life.

Shortly before Mabiletja’s appointment as chief of staff, in August 2024, her uncle Kgatla had met with success when he also invoked the late Mkhize in order to bolster a flimsy CV, or, to be technically accurate, to bolster two different versions of the same flimsy CV.

The public servant who tried to hold the line

Osborne Masilela served as chief director in the office of the director-general at the Department of Social Development (DSD) for 17 years before taking early retirement at the end of March 2026 due to a working environment he terms “increasingly toxic”.

Masilela knew the department processes inside and out, and could be bureaucratically unyielding as a result; he described himself to Daily Maverick using the Afrikaans word “lastig”, or bothersome.

Due to his long experience in the public service, when Tolashe took office as Minister of Social Development in July 2024, Masilela was asked to help vet the CVs of officials Tolashe was considering appointing to key positions around her.

“Mr Kgatla’s CV was sent through, and I read it, and Mr Kgatla did not meet the minimum requirements to be appointed at even the lowest level of special adviser,” Masilela told Daily Maverick.

“I informed the Minister of this in person. I remember, I held a meeting with her on a Sunday in July 2024 and briefed her on everything.”

DSD spokesperson Sandy Godlwana responded to Masilela’s claim by saying: “Our response as a department is that we cannot confirm the information shared by O Masilela to you. However, we can confirm that, based on his qualifications and experience, Mr Kgatla was appointed at an entry-level position of special adviser, in accordance with grading and approval by the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA)”.

Masilela had rejected Kgatla’s application on the basis that the DPSA regulations stipulate that although special advisers are appointed at the prerogative of the relevant Minister, they need to possess at a minimum “5 years’ experience at the level equivalent to Director level with relevant experience applicable to the portfolio or functions” – as spelled out in a 2024 DPSA circular seen by Daily Maverick.

Kgatla, on the basis of the CV seen by Masilela, did not have that, making him unappointable.

Yet Masilela discovered, to his considerable surprise, that Kgatla had been appointed as special adviser nonetheless.

“I was shocked because there was no way that between July and August [2024] he could suddenly have qualified to be an adviser,” Masilela told Daily Maverick.

“Something untoward would have had to happen.”

Something untoward had happened. What Masilela did not know at the time is that Kgatla had subsequently submitted a second CV, bypassing the lastig Masilela this time around.

Anatomy of a fraudulent CV

Daily Maverick is in possession of the two versions of Kgatla’s CV that he submitted: the first, rejected by Masilela, was accompanied by a cover letter dated 4 July 2024; the second was included by Minister Tolashe in a letter sent to the DPSA at the end of July informing Minister Mzamo Buthelezi that she intended to appoint Kgatla.

Kgatla acknowledged through his lawyers that he submitted two different versions of his CV, but claimed that the first CV sent to Masilela was “outdated and had not yet incorporated additional experience or refined descriptions”, while the second one was “an updated and consolidated version”.

The two CVs contain multiple points of difference, but the most notable relate to the job titles and the related dates of employment. Kgatla’s lawyers did not explain why the dates during which certain jobs were held differed by as much as two years between the two CVs.

To give one example: in Kgatla’s first CV, he stated he worked as a “Communications Officer (Contract)” for the North West Department of Community Safety and Traffic Management (Cosatma) from November 2021 to September 2023.

In Kgatla’s second CV, he is listed as working as a “Communications Officer (Deputy Director Level)” for Cosatma between 2019 and 2021, months unspecified.

Similar title inflation and date changes have been applied to almost all Kgatla’s previous roles in the second CV – though, as Daily Maverick discovered when we started digging, at least two of the roles appear to have been entirely fabricated and one somewhat exaggerated.

Kgatla’s first job on his first CV – but second on his second CV, since a radio presenter gig had now been added before that – was listed as “Journalist (Contract)” for the University of Limpopo, in terms of which his CV stated he had “provided professional leadership and management within the media sector”.

We phoned the University of Limpopo’s executive director of marketing and communications, Victor Kgomoeswana, to test this claim. It turned out to be partially true.

After checking records, Kgomoeswana reported back that Kgatla had been paid a small hourly stipend while enrolled at the University of Limpopo as one of a number of what the marketing department terms “student assistants”, tasked with writing articles for various in-house newsletters.

When it came to Cosatma, communication services director Oshebeng Koonyaditse began working there in the same year, 2019, as Kgatla’s second CV claimed he had started work at the same entity as a communications officer.

Koonyaditse could recall nobody of Kgatla’s name working there, but asked HR to check their records.

“We do not have anyone by that name in our system,” Koonyaditse subsequently told Daily Maverick.

Taking the late Minister’s name in vain

It was when it came to Kgatla’s alleged work for the late Hlengiwe Mkhize, however, that his deception was arguably the most brazen.

In both CVs, Kgatla claims to have worked for Mkhize’s Nolwazi-STEM NGO, which Mkhize’s daughter Zinzi explained to Daily Maverick was a relatively short-lived project aimed at promoting STEM education, which Mkhize launched after being axed from her post as Minister of Higher Education and Training by President Cyril Ramaphosa in February 2018.

During this period, before being appointed by Ramaphosa as Deputy Minister for Women in May 2019, Mkhize had time on her hands as an ANC backbencher – and Nolwazi-STEM was born.

In both CVs, Kgatla listed Mkhize by name and number as a reference – despite his claim that the second CV was an “updated version”.

In the first CV, Kgatla was a “Communications Officer” for Nolwazi-STEM for just under two years, ending in December 2020. In the second, he had been promoted to “Communications Manager” for Nolwazi-STEM between 2017 and 2018, months unspecified.

NGO records show, however, that Nolwazi-STEM was established only in October 2018.

When we asked Kgatla to explain how he could have started working for the NGO a year before it was established, his lawyers responded: “Our client was involved from as early as 2017, prior to formal establishment of the company.”

When asked to explain why Zinzi Mkhize, the treasurer of Nolwazi-STEM, could find no record of Kgatla as a banking app beneficiary alongside other contractors, his lawyers replied: “The role was informal and developmental, which explains the absence of formal records,” and, “Any benefits received were not structured as formal employment remuneration.”

They sent a bank statement, purportedly of Kgatla’s account, showing a single payment of R10,000 made to him by Nolwazi-STEM on 28 September 2019 – a date outside the period of employment claimed on the second version of his CV.

A former staffer of Mkhize who asked not to be named said that this payment was probably for a single opinion piece Kgatla wrote for Mkhize.

“His MO [modus operandi] was that he would send DMs [direct messages] to all the deputy ministers and ministers offering to help them with their communications or branding,” the staffer said.

Mkhize’s right-hand man Mothibe told Daily Maverick that in addition to this one opinion piece, the sole engagement Kgatla had had with Nolwazi-STEM was attending “one event at Diepsloot Combined [School] on the 10th of December 2019”.

On Kgatla’s CV, this became “Head of Communication at Nolwazi-STEM”.

“My late mom was an honourable woman with integrity,” Zinzi Mkhize told Daily Maverick.

“To see her name being dragged into these scandals is quite disturbing, and it saddens me.”

The urgent questions arising

The most likely reason for Kgatla’s revised second CV was not to “update” it, as claimed, but to tailor it in order to meet the criteria that his first CV had failed under Masilela’s beady eye: the requirement that he have at least five years’ experience at a level comparable to the DPSA grading of “director”.

For this reason, to give one example, his legitimate stint as a parliamentary and Cabinet coordinator under Tolashe when she took over from Mkhize as Deputy Minister for Women had to be upgraded to include the specification “Director Level” in his second CV.

Masilela says this is simply nonsense, and that the role equates to a deputy director level at best.

“Our client was a Parliamentary Liaison officer and this position was at the Deputy Director Level and we submit further that before our client departed, it was at the Director Level,” Kgatla’s lawyers informed us.

Daily Maverick asked the DPSA for clarity on this and other matters, including whether Kgatla actually met the criteria to be appointed as special adviser – even assuming that all his CV entries were legitimate. The DPSA had yet to comment at the time of writing.

The wider concern, however, is how frequently this is happening – and how the public service can possibly run effectively in a situation where it appears that, in cases like Kgatla’s, listed referees are not even tested for a pulse. DM