President Cyril Ramaphosa has returned Dina Pule to the cupboard as minister of social improvement, greater than a decade after she was faraway from the manager over an antagonistic ethics discovering tied to a telecommunications sector scandal.
Pule served as communications minister from 2011 to 2013 beneath former President Jacob Zuma. Her tenure is remembered within the expertise sector as considered one of its most turbulent, marked by paralysis at partially privatised operator Telkom, delays within the migration to digital terrestrial tv and glacial progress on releasing the radio frequency spectrum wanted for cell broadband.
In a 2012 column, TechCentral described her because the “minister of destruction”, arguing that authorities’s fixed interference – together with its choice to dam the sale of 20% of Telkom to South Korea’s Korea’s KT Corp and its shock vote in opposition to the operator’s board at an AGM – was damaging the corporate, presumably irreparably. Her dealing with of digital migration additionally landed the division within the excessive courtroom.
Pule was finally faraway from cupboard after parliament’s ethics committee discovered she had did not disclose her relationship with businessman Phosane Mngqibisa, who benefited improperly from her place.
Public protector Thuli Madonsela’s subsequent report concurred, discovering that R6-million of a R15-million MTN sponsorship for the 2012 ICT Indaba had been irregularly diverted to Mngqibisa’s firm, and that the division of communications had paid for his worldwide journey, together with an official journey with Pule to Mexico and the US. Madonsela accused Pule of “persistently mendacity” and beneficial she apologise to parliament, her division and the Sunday Instances.
Christian Louboutin footwear
It was the Sunday Instances that first uncovered the scandal by a sustained investigative sequence in 2012 and 2013. The newspaper’s reporting additionally gave the affair its most enduring picture: Pule’s red-soled Christian Louboutin footwear, allegedly gifted by Mngqibisa, although the ethics panel discovered inadequate proof to substantiate that exact declare.
Pule is likely one of the high 4 officers of the ANC Ladies’s League and probably the most senior league member sitting as an MP. The social improvement portfolio has by latest custom gone to a senior league official. She replaces Sisisi Tolashe, who was fired after failing to reveal a present of two luxurious automobiles to the ladies’s league.
Learn: Dina Pule selected boyfriend over state
Her reappointment, introduced on Tuesday, fashioned a part of a broader reshuffle by which Ramaphosa additionally eliminated three DA deputy ministers and moved former DA chief John Steenhuisen out of the agriculture portfolio, on the request of DA chief Geordin Hill-Lewis.
In the meantime, the Ahmed Kathrada Basis has added its voice to criticism of Pule’s appointment, calling on Ramaphosa to reverse it. The inspiration stated it considered Pule’s elevation to the social improvement portfolio “with absolute dismay”, arguing that South Africa can not construct a succesful, moral state by recycling people whose public information are tarnished by corruption and dishonesty.
It pointed to her 2013 dismissal from the cupboard, when she was sanctioned by parliament’s ethics committee. Inserting somebody beforehand discovered to have compromised her oath of workplace in command of a division that oversees social grants for thousands and thousands of susceptible residents was “an insult to the poor”, the inspiration stated. The appointment signalled that political expediency and factional trade-offs had been allowed to override moral governance, it added.
The inspiration known as for the speedy revocation of Pule’s appointment and stated Ramaphosa have to be held on to account, explaining to the nation how elevating somebody with a documented historical past of dishonesty aligns with a acknowledged dedication to scrub governance. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
