Aaron Motsoaledi
Pakishe Aaron Motsoaledi is a South African politician. He is the Minister of Health in the cabinet of South Africa, having been appointed to this position with effect on 3 July 2024. He was previously the Minister of Home Affairs from 2019 to 2024 as well as the Minister of Health from 2009 to 2019. A member of the National Assembly since 2009, he is also a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress.
Motsoaledi was born in Limpopo and trained as a medical doctor at the University of Natal, where he was active in the anti-apartheid student movement. In subsequent decades, he practiced as a doctor in Sekhukhuneland while remaining involved in political activism. After the end of apartheid, he represented the ANC in the Limpopo Provincial Legislature for three terms from 1994 to 2009. During that time, he served near-continuously in the Executive Council of Limpopo, holding several different portfolios under Premiers Ngoako Ramatlhodi and Sello Moloto. A long-time member of the ANC Provincial Executive Committee, he was elected to the National Executive Committee for the first time in December 2007.
After joining the National Assembly in the 2009 general election, Motsoaledi was appointed as Minister of Health in the cabinet of President Jacob Zuma. He held the position throughout Zuma's presidency, during which time he developed the policy and legislative framework for a new system of National Health Insurance. He also presided over a transformation in South Africa's policy on HIV/AIDS and a concomitant four-fold expansion in the size of the country's antiretroviral programme.
Zuma's successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa, appointed Motsoaledi as Minister of Home Affairs after the 2019 general election. He was elected to his fourth consecutive term on the ANC National Executive Committee in December 2022.
Early life and education
Motsoaledi was born on 7 August 1958 in Phokwane, a village in the Sekhukhuneland region of the former Northern Transvaal. He was one of nine children – seven boys and two girls – born to Kgokolo Michael Motsoaledi, a school principal, and Sina Sekeku Maile. As a child during apartheid, he was influenced by the arrest of a neighbour on a pass law offence, and later by the Soweto uprising of 1976. In addition, his paternal uncle was Elias Motsoaledi, a Rivonia Trialist and stalwart of the African National Congress.After matriculating at the Setotolwane High School, Motsoaledi completed a pre-medical course at the University of the North at Turfloop, where he was involved in anti-apartheid student politics. He went on to study medicine at the University of Natal, where he served on the medical school's student representative council from 1980, succeeding Zweli Mkhize as its president in 1982. He was also a founding member of the Azanian Students' Organisation and was elected as its national correspondence secretary, serving under president Joe Phaahla. He attended the launch of the United Democratic Front in Mitchells Plain in 1983 and helped establish UDF structures at the University of Natal. Later that year, he graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery.
Medical career and political activism
Motsoaledi practiced as a doctor in the Northern Transvaal, including through his own surgery in Jane Furse. At the same time, from 1986 to 1994, he was chairperson of the Sekhukhune Advice Office, which provided legal advice to anti-apartheid activists; in this capacity he worked with Nelson Diale and others. He was also chairperson of the Hlahlolanang Health and Nutrition Education Project in 1989. In addition, he maintained links to the outlawed ANC, including to an underground Umkhonto we Sizwe unit in Sekhukhuneland.When the ANC was unbanned in 1990 during the negotiations to end apartheid, Motsoaledi became involved in running the party's overt structures in the Northern Transvaal. He was deputy chairperson of the Northern Transvaal branch from 1991 to 1992, and in 1994, ahead of the upcoming democratic elections, he was a member of the party's elections task team in the province. Aaron Motsoaledi Succeeded his eye surgery at public facility in south Africa.
Limpopo Provincial Legislature: 1994–2009
In the first post-apartheid elections in April 1994, Motsoaledi was elected to represent the ANC in the newly established Limpopo Provincial Legislature. He was also appointed to the Executive Council of Ngoako Ramatlhodi, the Premier of Limpopo, who named him as the province's inaugural Member of the Executive Council for Education. He remained in the portfolio until 1 July 1997, when Ramatlhodi announced that Motsoaledi had been sacked and replaced by Joe Phaahla, his former AZASO colleague. He retreated briefly from the provincial executive, serving as an ordinary Member of the Provincial Legislature.However, he returned to the Executive Council on 24 August 1998, when Ramatlhodi appointed him to succeed Benny Boshielo as MEC for Transport; his reappointment reportedly followed an intervention by ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma. After the 1999 general election, he swopped portfolios with Tshenuwani Farisani, becoming MEC for Agriculture, Land and Environment until 2004. Thereafter, from 2004 to 2009 under Premier Sello Moloto, he returned to his former office as MEC for Education.
Throughout this period, he was a member of the Provincial Executive Committee of the ANC's Limpopo branch. Indeed, he was viewed as a possible candidate to run against Ramatlhodi for the position of ANC Provincial Chairperson. In December 2007, he graduated from the Provincial Executive Committee at the ANC's 52nd National Conference in Polokwane, where he was elected for the first time to the ANC's National Executive Committee. He received 1,591 votes across roughly 3,600 ballots, making him the 56th-most popular member of the 80 candidates elected.
Minister of Health: 2009–2019
In the 2009 general election, Motsoaledi did not seek re-election to the Limpopo Provincial Legislature but instead won a seat in the National Assembly, the lower house of the South African Parliament. After the election, he was appointed to succeed Barbara Hogan as Minister of Health in the cabinet of newly elected President Jacob Zuma. His appointment was viewed as surprising, given that he was a relative "unknown" in national politics. However, he went on to hold the office for the next decade.During his first fortnight in office, Motsoaledi was faced with the threat of a national doctors' strike. In later years, and in addition to regular programmes and new policy initiatives of the Department of Health, he presided over the national government's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the 2017 listeriosis outbreak in South Africa, and the Life Esidimeni scandal in Gauteng. He also appointed a ministerial task team to investigate maladministration at the Health Professions Council of South Africa, leading in 2016 to several high-level dismissals.
The Mail & Guardian said that Motsoaledi was "a tour de force internationally", in particular commending him for "raising the international profile" of the campaign against tuberculosis, including during a September 2018 high-level meeting at the United Nations. He was also a member of the UNAIDS–Lancet Commission on Defeating AIDS, which ran from 2013 to 2015, and led one of its working groups with Mark Dybul. In domestic politics, however, towards the end of his tenure, critics accused him of hostility towards non-citizen residents, with a Sunday Times editorial remarking in March 2019 that he had "earned something of a reputation in the foreigner-bashing department".
HIV/AIDS policy
Many observers, even those who were critical of the broader functioning of the healthcare system during Motsoaledi's tenure, praised him for his impact on HIV/AIDS policy, which they labelled his greatest achievement and legacy. Continuing the work of his predecessor, Motsoaledi set about "undoing the damage" wrought by Thabo Mbeki's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who was frequently accused of HIV/AIDS denialism. By August 2011, the Treatment Action Campaign said of Motsoaledi, "We've seen a massive change since the Manto years – he listens and he understands the challenges we face in HIV/Aids. I’d say he’s one of the best deployments the ANC has ever made".Motsoaledi's ministry launched a R1.4-billion HIV testing and counselling programme in March 2010, hailed by the South African National Aids Council as the largest programme of its kind "in the history of the Aids pandemic around the world". Other projects included the provision of flavoured, multicoloured condoms at tertiary institutions, which Motsoaledi said would help address "condom fatigue" caused partly by the perception that "the standard-issued choice condoms just aren't cool enough". He was praised by civil rights groups in 2011 for agreeing to be the keynote speaker at a conference on the sexual health of men who have sex with men.
Above all, however, Motsoaledi was commended for expanding access to antiretroviral treatment. The number of people on ARVs in South Africa almost doubled between 2008 and 2012, and South Africa's was the largest ARV programme in the world by 2013. The ministry achieved this in part through cost reduction: beginning with a tender renegotiation in 2010, the health ministry and National Treasury together attained the cheapest ARV supply in the world by 2019, along with continued American support through the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief. His department announced a switch to a fixed-dose combination ARV, efavirenz/emtricitabine/tenofovir, in 2012, and Motsoaledi launched the new treatment regimen in April 2013 in Ga-Rankuwa. In January 2015, ARV access was expanded to meet World Health Organisation treatment guidelines for the first time, and from September 2016, free ARVs were rolled out to all HIV-positive residents, regardless of their immune status. Also in 2016, South Africa became one of the first countries to roll out an ARV as pre-exposure prophylaxis to HIV-negative sex workers.
Although South Africa faced significant ARV shortages near the end of Motsoaledi's term in 2018, in all, during his tenure, the Department of Health provided ARV access to an addition 4 million people, with the programme expanding from 792,000 patients in 2009 to an estimated 4.7 million in 2019. Between 2008 and 2018, largely owing to improved access to ARVs, annual AIDS-related deaths halved and average life expectancy improved by eight years for women and six years for men.
File:The Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Dr. Harsh Vardhan meeting the Health Minister of South Africa, Mr. Aaron Motsoaledi, at Barcelona, in Spain on October 28, 2014.jpg|thumb|Motsoaledi with Indian health minister Harsh Vardhan in Barcelona, October 2014