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Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma
She ran three South African ministries, then the continent's executive — and wrote it a fifty-year plan.
The rise
Born on 27 January 1949 in Natal, she read zoology at Zululand and began medicine at Natal; active in the black student movement, she went into exile in 1976 and qualified as a doctor at Bristol in 1978. She practised in Swaziland and Britain, worked on the ANC's health committee in exile and came home in 1990.
What they did
Mandela made her Minister of Health in 1994; she then ran Foreign Affairs (1999–2009) and Home Affairs (2009–2012). Elected on 15 July 2012, she chaired the African Union Commission from October 2012 to January 2017, the first woman to lead it or the OAU before it, and drove Agenda 2063, the fifty-year plan the AU adopted in 2015. In 2017 she lost the ANC presidency to Ramaphosa.
The full picture
As health minister she gave Mbongeni Ngema R14 million for the AIDS musical Sarafina II, a tender the Public Protector faulted in 1996; in 1997 she backed Virodene, an untested solvent pitched to cabinet as an AIDS cure. Courts struck down her 2020 tobacco ban as unconstitutional. Her AU term is widely judged low-key.
Why it matters
The first woman to run a continental executive, and the author of the only long-horizon plan the African Union has produced — an institution, for once, thinking past the next election.
“Thus drawing from past experiences, and our desire to write our own future, we developed Agenda 2063.”