CIVIL SOCIETY
Fikile Mbalula
Lunch spot: Nambitha, Orlando West, Soweto
Mbalula cut his teeth in ANC politics at the tender age of 13 and rose to the ANC Youth League presidency. Those around him describe him as a revolutionary impatient for change, and also a firm internationalist.
After 1994, he was elected to the national executive committee of the ANC Youth League, where he served as the secretary for political education. After serving as provincial secretary of the Free State, he was elected national secretary general for two terms. He was elected as the president of the ANC Youth League in 2004, making him a member of both the ANC national working committee and national executive committee.
Carrie Shelver
Lunch spot: Sai Thai, Cyrildene
Carrie Shelver is a feminist and gender activist who has worked in the violence against women and human rights sector. She is currently working for People Opposing Women Abuse as the training and public awareness manager. She has been actively involved in the One in Nine campaign, which was launched in March last year to provide support to and solidarity with survivors of sexual violence. Prior to working in the women’s sector, Shelver was involved in the lesbian and gay sector. Her academic background is in adult education, politics and applied linguistics. She is committed to the transformation of society, which will result in the realisation of constitutional rights and guarantees.
Dirk Hermann
Lunch spot: Die Werf, Pretoria
Dirk Hermann is the deputy general secretary of trade union Solidarity. He is regularly quoted in the South African media concerning labour-related matters and is the author of numerous published articles. He is the author of two books about the South African policy of affirmative action and South African tertiary institutions respectively. A third book on affirmative action will be published later this year. In 1993, Hermann obtained a degree in law, after which he obtained three postgraduate qualifications in industrial psychology, industrial sociology and labour law. He received his master’s degree cum laude and was awarded best master’s degree student in labour relations.
Hermann has addressed three international academic conferences on affirmative action and trade unionism in the new economy. He was chairperson of the student council of Potchefstroom University in 1995 and 1996 and led the transformation process on behalf of the students. He was also a member of the minister of education’s task team on the transformation of tertiary institutions as well as a member of the South African Students’ Council. In 1996, he was awarded the council medal of Potchefstroom University for academic achievement and community development. During that same year, he received the sought-after Abe Bailey travel bursary to England for leadership and academic development, and underwent a six-month in-service training programme in the United States in the field of labour relations.
Elizabeth O’Leary
Lunch spot: Gogo’s House, Diepkloof; Hillfield, Goshen, Connecticut; my garden
Elizabeth O’Leary is the executive director of Women for Housing, a section-21 company that facilitates opportunities for women in the housing and construction sectors. O’Leary has lived in South Africa for most of the past 12 years and is proud to be part of a vibrant and changing industry. Women for Housing is developing programmes and services that support the implementation of the construction charter and BEE codes at all levels. A women’s investment fund that focuses on the construction and property sectors will be launched later this year. The fund will be one of a number of new avenues of growth for the organisation, which received a Govan Mbeki Housing Award in October last year in acknowledgement of its contribution to the sector. O’Leary has a master’s degree in international relations from Boston University in the United States. She has a long-standing love of the industry and is encouraged to see that more women are entering and succeeding in the sector.
Fatima Hassan
Lunch spot: Birds Restaurant, Cape Town; Soi, Johannesburg
Fatima Hassan is a commander in the battle against HIV and Aids. An attorney and former deputy head of the Aids Law Project, she remains an activist and is now committed to fighting for the rights of people infected and affected by HIV and Aids. She has been attorney of record in several key cases against government, big business and pharmaceutical companies that involved non-discrimination as well as access to treatment. Currently the coordinator of the Treatment Action Campaign’s treatment monitoring programme (jointly run with the Aids Law Project), she remains a committed grassroots activist, too. Hassan graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994, completed an LLM at Duke University and was awarded the Franklin Thomas Fellowship by the Constitutional Court. In 2004, she was one of the Mail & Guardian‘s top 20 under-40s. Hassan features in the Financial Mail Little Black Book as well as the M&G‘s The Book of South African Women.
Judith February
Lunch spot: Caveau, Cape Town; Tokara, Stellenbosch; Rick’s Café, Cape Town
Judith February is a lawyer and head of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s (Idasa) governance programme, the Political Information and Monitoring Service. February studied law at the University of Cape Town where she obtained her BA (Law) and her LLB degrees in 1991 and 1993 respectively. She was admitted as an attorney in 1996 and practised law in Cape Town until 2000, when she obtained her LLM in commercial law from the same university. February has been at Idasa since June 2000 and has worked extensively on issues of good governance, transparency and accountability in the South African context.
She is particularly interested in law as a tool for advocacy, the intersection between law and politics, and the development and interpretation of socio-economic rights jurisprudence in the country. February is a regular contributor on local political issues in the media and has been listed in the Financial Mail Little Black Book of 300 black professionals for 2006 and is also listed in the Mail & Guardian‘s The Book of South African Women, released in December last year. She is the chair of the Goedgedacht Forum for Social Reflection and has a fortnightly column, Between the Lines, in the Cape Times.
Ruth Hall
Lunch spot: Don Pedro’s, Woodstock
Ruth Hall researches and engages in policymaking regarding land redistribution, land restitution, farm dwellers’ tenure rights and integrated-development planning at the University of the Western Cape. She is a pundit on land redistribution policy and practice and her research on the subject is underpinned by gender rights and farm-dweller tenure. Hall cut her teeth on agricultural rights working for the Centre for Rural Legal Studies, an NGO based in Stellenbosch, where she worked on farm workers’ labour and tenure rights, including farm worker minimum wage regulations. She hails from the Eastern Cape, where she developed her love for land issues. She is currently reading for her doctorate in the faculty of politics at the University of Oxford and working on a dissertation on the politics of land reform in post-apartheid South Africa, 1990 to 2004. Hall has acted as an adviser to the department of land affairs. She has authored or co-authored 28 publications, mainly about the socio-political impact of land reform in South Africa. Her first book, The Land Question in South Africa, co-edited with Lungisile Ntsebeza, will be published later this year.
Silumko Radebe
Lunch spot: Mnandis, Noordhoek; Backroom, Pimville, Soweto
Born, bred and living in Soweto, Silumko Khetokuhle Einstein Radebe-Mabona has taken up those issues that have the biggest impact on his community. He currently lives in Pimville, where he mobilises and organises actions by communities to improve basic service delivery by the government. The Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) is a social movement that fights against any form of privatisation of state assets by the government. The 22 communities with which the APF works are mainly poor and semi-developed and they resist the implementation of what they call the “micro-neo-liberal policy of the government that has lead to a further collapse in the provision of basic service delivery”. He says working for the private sector until 2003 gave him a chance to learn what it meant to be exploited. He decided to become involved in community struggles instead and wants to motivate the youth to become involved in community issues.
Tshepiso Raletsemo
Lunch spot: Zahava, Norwood
Tshepiso Raletsemo is the chairperson of Women for Housing, an organisation that facilitates opportunities for women involved in the housing sector and empowers them through advocacy, training and support. Raletsemo is the managing director of Inkanyeli Projects, a 100% black-owned professional construction company. In 1998, Raletsemo joined international construction company Turner and Townsend Africa as a trainee quantity surveyor on scholarship. She qualified as a quantity surveyor at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2001 and joined Turner and Townsend on a full-time basis in December 2002.
Two years later, Raletsemo and her partners started Inkanyeli Projects, which is involved in general building works and mentorship for emerging contractors. Raletsemo is also an accredited mentor with the University of the Free State. She is currently studying towards a master’s in property development and management through Wits. Raletsemo also sits on the councils of the South African Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors and Construction South Africa. Her dream is to see South African women becoming self-sufficient and financially independent.
