Farewell, Sisisi Tolashe, you will not be missed

After eight months of Daily Maverick investigations exposing governance failures, irregular conduct, brazen dishonesty and abuse of resources by the minister of social development, Sisisi Tolashe, President Cyril Ramaphosa has finally fired her.

He refused to give detailed reasons in the National Assembly on Thursday for her dismissal, citing “various reports in the media” — but in reality, there was no need. The only question that really mattered was the one Ramaphosa has faced more than any other in his presidential tenure: Why did it take him so long?

To understand how Sisisi Tolashe ended up here — dismissed in scandal, her ministerial career in ruins, her name synonymous with precisely the kind of governance failure the Government of National Unity (GNU) was meant to repudiate — you have to go back much further than the luxury SUVs, the state-funded nanny, or the falsified CVs that proliferated in her office.

The seeds of Tolashe’s rise and fall were planted years ago, in a political culture that rewarded loyalty over competence and confused factional muscle with the ability to run things.

The party soldier

The role that made Tolashe a national figure initially was her seven years as secretary-general of the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) from 2008 to 2015. But it also established the template for everything that followed, as the ANCWL’s mandate shifted from women’s advocacy to becoming a vehicle for factional protection.

In this role during the Zuma years, Tolashe helped provide the embattled President with his most reliable institutional cover, with the ANCWL consistently prioritising the protection of a man credibly accused of serious misconduct over the interests of the women it claimed to represent. She was elected to the ANC’s National Executive Committee at Polokwane on a pro-Zuma ticket and spent the better part of a decade as a dependable instrument of party loyalty.

Tolashe was ousted from the ANCWL leadership in August 2015, not for any ethical transgression but for factional reasons: the league was pivoting toward Bathabile Dlamini’s harder-line faction, and Tolashe was not sufficiently aligned. She would go on to take her revenge at the Department of Social Development nine years later, where insiders described a pattern of retribution towards staff members perceived as Dlamini-aligned.

At the time, however, Tolashe retreated to the backbenches of the National Assembly, and then, in early 2018, accepted a poisoned chalice: the executive mayoralty of the Enoch Mgijima Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape.

This appointment is instructive, as she was not sent there because she had any particular expertise in municipal turnarounds. She was sent because she was a high-ranking NEC member trusted to “control” a rebellious, failing municipality on behalf of the party. What Tolashe discovered instead was an environment with virtually no financial controls, which became a testing ground for what a 2025 forensic investigation commissioned by the Department of Social Development would call Tolashe’s “governance glitches”.

What happened at Enoch Mgijima should have been disqualifying for any high-level future political leadership post, let alone a membership of the executive.

The National Treasury’s December 2022 Financial Recovery Plan for the municipality traced the origins of its terminal crisis directly to 2018: the year Tolashe arrived.

Under her watch, provincial intervention produced what Treasury would later characterise as “little or no progress.” Revenue collection collapsed by R74-million in a single quarter. Fuel expenditure and overtime tripled over the December holidays when the municipality was closed.

The Auditor-General’s reports from her tenure documented unfunded budgets and chronic irregular expenditure. A Cogta briefing to Parliament described the period following her election as mayor as characterised by service delivery protests and financial crisis. Her successor at Enoch Mgijima would later tell a portfolio committee that the damning audit reports being discussed reflected the “administration under the previous mayor”.

Tolashe left the municipality behind her in a state of ruin and returned to Parliament in 2019 — unscathed, unrebuked, and already positioning for her next advancement.

This, it turns out, would become the pattern: maladministration followed by promotion.

The uses of a useful woman

It was not the Zuma administration that deployed Tolashe as a “troubleshooter” to Enoch Mgijima, but Ramaphosa’s.

Ramaphosa, it emerged, would find Tolashe as useful an instrument as Zuma had — because he was particularly in need of reliable Eastern Cape allies for his own factional consolidation.

Tolashe was able to transition from the Zuma camp to the Ramaphosa camp with the kind of seamless fluency that marks a true political opportunist. She supported Ramaphosa’s re-election as ANC president at the 2022 national conference, was linked politically to Oscar Mabuyane and his allies in the Eastern Cape, and in March 2023 was rewarded with appointment as deputy minister in the Presidency for women, youth and persons with disabilities.

Four months later, in July 2023, Tolashe was elected president of the ANC Women's League, defeating Bathabile Dlamini so comprehensively that Dlamini received only 170 votes to Tolashe’s 1,729, and in June 2024, following the formation of the GNU, Ramaphosa would hand her the Department of Social Development.

Here, it’s worth reflecting on the ANC’s management of this particular portfolio over the preceding 15 years.

The department that manages South Africa’s entire social protection architecture has been treated, for a decade and a half, as a political reward rather than a hugely significant governance responsibility.

Dlamini, who held the portfolio from 2010 to 2018, brought the whole system to the brink of destruction. The 2017 social grants crisis, in which the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) payment system came within days of collapse, was the direct product of her negligence.

Susan Shabangu and Lindiwe Zulu followed as ministers in quick succession between 2018 and 2024, with neither managing to repair the damage Dlamini had done nor to add any lasting institutional contribution of their own, presiding over persistent Sassa payment failures and a department that lurched from crisis to crisis. It was under Zulu, a former Department of Social Development (DSD) staffer told me, that a “toxic” atmosphere set in at the department.

And then came Tolashe.

The ministerial pipeline that broke a department

Neither Shabangu nor Zulu held significant roles in the ANCWL while leading the DSD, but Dlamini and Tolashe’s examples suggest, nonetheless, that the ANC has come to perceive a kind of pipeline effect between the ANCWL and the social development portfolio: do your time mobilising the gogos of the ANCWL in support of the ANC leadership, and be rewarded with this ministerial position.

When Tolashe won the ANCWL presidency in July 2023, her appointment as social development minister less than a year later gave the impression that the ANCWL presidency had become the qualifying credential for the role.

The “logic” behind this arrangement is not difficult to decode. Social development is regarded within the ANC as a “women’s portfolio”, with its mandate covering grants, child welfare, early childhood development, and social protection, all areas the ANCWL rhetorically champions.

Giving its president the DSD portfolio carries the appearance of alignment between women’s leadership and women’s issues, but far more importantly, it also serves the ANC’s internal power dynamics: it binds the ANCWL’s president’s political fortunes to the ANC president’s own.

As the Tolashe case demonstrated, the inevitable downside of this arrangement is that removing a failing minister carries internal party costs — because the minister is not merely an individual but a factional anchor.

The problem is that an ANCWL leader who is likely to have built her power base by distributing patronage and protecting factional allies is precisely the wrong person to run a department where those instincts lead directly to irregular appointments, cronyism, and the misuse of public resources.

South Africa has now run this experiment twice and received the same result both times. It is time to stop running it.

The reckoning

It is hard to identify the real successes of Tolashe’s relatively brief tenure at the helm of the DSD. Staffers say her main interest was participating in Sassa outreach programmes, where she could arrive in communities as a sort of social welfare fairy godmother, dispensing government aid to the grateful poor.

What really ended up distinguishing Tolashe’s time as a minister from the garden-variety poor performance that characterises too much of South African governance was the brazenness of her misconduct and deceit.

Amid the hiring and firing chaos within her office as Tolashe sought to surround herself with dependent cronies and banish dissidents, two particular acts exposed by Daily Maverick will probably come to define her legacy.

The two BAIC SUVs donated by Chinese officials, registered not in the name of the ANC Women’s League, as she told Parliament, but in the names of her own adult children, amounted to an apparently calculated defrauding of the very institution she called her political home.

And the sordid, poignant case of a household assistant placed on the DSD payroll and allegedly compelled to hand over half her salary to Tolashe’s daughter prompted genuine public outrage at the spectacle of a minister supposedly responsible for protecting vulnerable South Africans, apparently exploiting one for private labour.

Throughout the eight months in which Daily Maverick has been investigating her department, Tolashe has deployed the tools of a practised political survivor: evasion or outright lies in committee hearings, blame-shifting to subordinates, and a defiance calibrated precisely to the political protection she calculated she still enjoyed.

The ANCWL insurance policy was real, and it held for eight months longer than it should have.

Ramaphosa issued a written rebuke to her in March 2026 for initiating disciplinary proceedings against the department’s director-general, Peter Netshipale, without presidential authority. He watched criminal charges be laid by political parties, damning forensic reports stack up, ANC Integrity Commission hearings scheduled, and portfolio committee sittings deteriorate into exercises in ministerial stonewalling.

And then, on Thursday, 14 May, eight months after our first investigations broke, Ramaphosa acted.

By the time he did, the damage was comprehensively done: to the department, to the credibility of the GNU’s anti-corruption commitments, and to the millions of grant recipients whose lives were in the hands of a minister whose primary concern should have been their welfare rather than how best to surreptitiously register Chinese-donated vehicles.

Tolashe is, in the end, a precise product of the system that produced her. She learned that loyalty was the currency that mattered, while governance failures had no consequences.

And she learned, finally, that her party would protect its own until protecting them, particularly in an election year, became more expensive than cutting them loose.

South Africa’s poorest citizens — the ones who wait at Sassa pay points, who depend on the child support grant, who have no fallback when the system fails them — have been used as the backdrop to 15 years of political machinations. They deserve a minister for whom this all-important department is a calling, not a loyalty prize. DM