As deputy secretary-general of the ANC, Yasmin “Jessie” Duarte, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 68, was arguably the most powerful woman in the country, and used her position to aid and abet state capture.
According to testimony at the Zondo commission, she instructed ANC MPs to ignore the massive corruption at the heart of state capture.
She warned them not to pursue corruption allegations at state-owned enterprises such as the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa), Transnet, SA Airways and Eskom too closely, and to refrain from holding ministers and their deputies accountable when they appeared before parliamentary oversight committees.
A leaked cadre deployment memorandum by the ANC to all government departments stipulated that the party leadership, through Duarte, had to approve all government and SOE appointments.
She and then ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe attended weekly caucus meetings to ensure MPs did their bidding. According to testimony, they instructed them in effect to “violate the constitution”.
In April 2021, a leaked recording emerged of her advising former president Jacob Zuma not to appear at the state capture inquiry after he’d been ordered to testify by the Constitutional Court.
She said testimony heard at the Zondo commission was an “onslaught on the people”. Testimony at the commission implicated her ex-husband and son in state capture, which she denied.
Her son-in-law, Ian Whitley, was chief of staff in the office of former finance minister Des van Rooyen during his four-day stint as head of the National Treasury in December 2015.
Though stating more than once that she’d be willing to testify before deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo, she never did.
In 2017, when the devastating consequences for the country of Zuma’s presidency had become all too evident, she instructed ANC MPs not to vote for his removal.
Suddenly she was the boss of the people who had arrested and detained her and made her life hell. Some were openly hostile, others overly friendly in a way that stuck in her gullet.
Born on September 19 1953, Duarte grew up in one of the toughest neighbourhoods in the country, a “coloured” suburb called Newclare in Johannesburg, where crime and gangsterism were rife. She was one of nine children and her mother worked in a factory making underwear most of her life to support them. Later she became a trade unionist.
On her father’s side, Duarte was related to Nelson Mandela’s old friend Amina Cachalia, who was involved in the Transvaal Indian Congress. By the time she was 15, Duarte was in the thick of the struggle against apartheid. She and two of her brothers were detained on several occasions.
As a United Democratic Front activist, she was effectively banned under the first state of emergency in 1985, until the unbanning of the ANC in 1990. “They called it a restriction order, but really it was a banning order,” she said.
She got a job at Beyers Naudé’s Ecumenical Advice Bureau, running a scholarship programme for young people training in public administration. In 1990 the ANC returnees’ committee asked if she’d be interested in working with Mandela as one of his special assistants.
She worked at Luthuli House (known at the time as Shell House) until he became president in 1994 when, at the age of 40, she was thrown into the deep end as provincial MEC for safety and security in Gauteng. Suddenly she was the boss of the people who had arrested and detained her and made her life hell. Some were openly hostile, others overly friendly in a way that stuck in her gullet.
“I struggled with the fact that here was a person who was being very friendly now and, when they had detained me, were not and had been quite brutal”, she said in an interview with the Sunday Times.
Transforming a brutal, white Afrikaner male-dominated police force while fighting an avalanche of crime, would have tested the most seasoned professional. But her life had been as a political activist, and running a government department called for administrative skills she patently did not have.
It was said at the time that the only thing stopping then Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale from firing her was Mandela, who had a soft spot for her.
Then she was caught infringing the rules and lied to protect herself.
The opposition and the press pounced. She fought her corner viciously, attacking the press, playing the racecard, bullying her underlings and generally behaving like the street fighter those who knew her said she was.
She appointed a consultant at R280,000 a year, way above the going rate. He had no qualifications for the job and had been dismissed by a previous employer for suspected credit card fraud. If he had been white, spat Duarte when challenged, “his qualifications would not have been an issue”.
She took a friend to Portugal at the taxpayers’ expense. Duarte said the trip had been paid for by the Portuguese government, until records showed her department had paid. Then she said her friend was a government consultant, but the press exposed him as a full-time executive in a private company.
“Vintage Jessie-speak,” sighed those who knew her.
Then came the knockout blow. Her official car was in an accident with her behind the wheel, and she did not have a driver’s licence.
Several versions were put out by her department: that she was not driving the car, her bodyguard was; nobody was driving the car, it was stationary when another car bumped it. Strong-arm tactics were used to get the transport officer in her department to sign a fraudulent letter supporting Duarte’s version.
When her department was found to be “dysfunctional” she blamed her staff: “You inherit people.”
When she was forced to resign she blamed the press. “There was a huge media wrecking of my life,” she said later.
In fact her life went from strength to strength.
She was elected to the ANC national executive committee in 1997 and appointed SA’s ambassador to Mozambique two years later.
At the end of her term as ambassador she became the ANC’s national spokesperson and then COO for the presidency.
She was elected deputy secretary-general of the ANC at its national conference in Mangaung in December 2012 and used the considerable influence this position gave her to push for a media tribunal answerable to parliament, “whereby the media can also be held accountable”.
Duarte, who presented herself as a champion of women’s rights and frequently attacked the media for “misogyny”, had defended Zuma during his 2006 rape trial and blamed the media for its coverage, which she said was “degrading” to him as a human being and “completely just atrocious”.
She became acting secretary-general of the ANC in May 2021, when then secretary-general Ace Magashule was suspended after being charged with corruption. She had a strained working relationship with Magashule, which didn’t improve after she formally communicated his suspension to him and ensured his access card to Luthuli House was disabled.
Duarte, who described herself as an atheist with “a spiritual side” — people just had to “learn to find that spot”, she said — was diagnosed with cancer eight months ago.
She is survived by two children and four grandchildren.
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