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Mbhazima Samuel Shilowa (born 30 April 1958) is a retired South African politician and former trade unionist. He was the third Premier of Gauteng between 1999 and 2008. He was formerly the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) between 1993 and 1999, and he later became a co-founder of the Congress of the People (Cope).
Born in the rural Northern Province, Shilowa became active in the trade union movement as a shop steward in Johannesburg in 1981. He rose through the ranks of the Transport and General Workers' Union before becoming Cosatu's deputy general secretary in 1991 and its general secretary in 1993. During this period he was also active in anti-apartheid politics, including as a member of Cosatu's Tripartite Alliance partners: he joined the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party in 1991 and joined the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994.
After the June 1999 general election, Shilowa resigned as Cosatu general secretary to represent the ANC as Premier of Gauteng. The flagship policies of his administration included the construction of the Gautrain. Although he was re-elected to a second term as premier in the April 2004 general election, he resigned from the office on 29 September 2008; a political ally and personal friend of Thabo Mbeki, he resigned in protest of the ANC's decision to recall Mbeki from the national presidency.
In October 2008, he resigned his ANC membership to co-found an ANC breakaway party, COPE, with Mosiuoa Lekota. He became COPE's inaugural deputy president and, after the April 2009 general election, its chief whip in the National Assembly of South Africa. However, within 18 months, COPE was divided by an ongoing leadership contest between Lekota and Shilowa, who claimed to have been elected as COPE's new president by an abortive party conference in December 2010. The Lekota-led faction expelled Shilowa from the party in February 2011.
Meanwhile, through Cosatu, Shilowa was active in the anti-apartheid movement's Mass Democratic Movement. After the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP) were unbanned in 1990, he was elected to the interim leadership corps that oversaw the parties' organisational revival in Gauteng. In 1991 he was elected to the Central Committee of the SACP for the first time. The following year, during the negotiations to end apartheid, he was a member of the ANC's negotiating team at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), and he was later a delegate to the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum.
Under Shilowa, Cosatu became a key campaigning vehicle for the ANC ahead of the first post-apartheid elections in April 1994, under the auspices of the Tripartite Alliance, and its close relationship to the party persisted when the party entered government. Shilowa was closely involved in the establishment of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac). He was also a close personal friend and informal adviser to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, and, writing in 1996, Gevisser argued that his political talent and political experience were among his greatest strengths as Cosatu leader, though they also made him an object of some suspicion among hardline unionists. He was viewed as "uncomfortable with Cosatu's hardline anti-Privatization position".
During his tenure as Cosatu general secretary, Shilowa was twice a member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC. He was first elected to the organ at the ANC's 49th National Conference in December 1994, though he resigned before the committee completed its three-year term. At the party's next elective conference, the 50th National Conference in Mahikeng in December 1997, he was elected to return to a five-year term on the committee, which he served in full. Controversially, the committee appointed Shilowa to serve on an internal task team charged with investigating the actions of the SACP's left wing during the ANC's 50th Conference.
He resigned as COSATU secretary-general soon after the 2 June election, when it became clear that the ANC had won a comfortable majority in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature, and he was formally elected as premier, unopposed, on 15 June 1999. He was re-elected to a second term as premier after the April 2004 general election.
The best-known initiative of his administration was the Gautrain express rail system, long nicknamed the Shilowa Express, which he announced during his first term as premier. After significant delays, a construction contract for the railway was signed in 2006. Shilowa's administration was also an early adopter of a progressive HIV/AIDS policy; his government announced the rollout of a mother-to-child transmission prevention programme in 2001 and the general rollout of an anti-retroviral treatment programme in 2004, while the policies were still unpopular in the national government.
At the conclusion of his second term as provincial chairperson in October 2007, Shilowa declined a nomination to stand for a third; instead, he reportedly supported Paul Mashatile's successful bid to succeed him. The elective conference elected Shilowa as an ordinary member of the ANC's Provincial Executive Committee.
In the aftermath of Mbeki's defeat, Shilowa himself withdrew from contention for election to the ANC's National Executive Committee. He initially told press that if he was not elected "I won't feel disheartened. At least I took a stand." However, shortly before the vote, he withdrew his candidacy, explaining, "I decided that this is an NEC that I don't want to be part of."
I am resigning due to my convictions that while the African National Congress has the right to recall any of its deployed cadres, the decision needs to be based on solid facts, be fair and just. I also did not feel that I will be able to, with conviction, publicly explain or defend the national executive committee’s decision on comrade Thabo Mbeki... It is a known fact that I hold strong views on the manner of his dismissal, and to pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. I acknowledge and respect the ANC’s rights to recall any of its deployed cadres. I am, however, of the view that there was no cogent reason for doing so.He later said that Mbeki's ouster had been "the straw that broke the camel's back", compounding his pre-existing concerns about the contemporary ANC's approach to "honesty, integrity, solidarity, humaneness and the rule of law". Mashatile was elected to succeed him as premier.
Meanwhile, Shilowa was immediately linked to a rumored breakaway initiative in the ANC, associated with national minister Mosiuoa Lekota. On 15 October 2008, he held a press conference in Johannesburg at which he announced that he had resigned from the ANC to work full-time as the "convenor and volunteer-in-chief" of Lekota's initiative. He later said that he had approached Lekota after hearing him criticize the ANC in a radio interview. While COSATU condemned his decision, ANC spokeswoman Jessie Duarte said, "We knew he was going to do that."
Though he was named as the party's interim deputy chairperson, Shilowa quickly eclipsed Lekota and Mluleki George as the face of the new party, leading to rumors that he might become its leader. However, when COPE held its inaugural national congress in Bloemfontein in December 2008, the leadership was elected by "consensus" rather than vote, and Shilowa became the party's deputy president, under Lekota as party president. He was officially the party's first deputy president, with businesswoman Lynda Odendaal named as second deputy president.
Pursuant to the putative expulsion, Lekota's faction notified the Speaker of the National Assembly that Shilowa was no longer authorized to represent the party in Parliament, but Speaker Max Sisulu did not accept the notification, saying that he could not adjudicate COPE's internal leadership controversies. Later the same week, Lekota obtained an interim court order interdicting Shilowa from attending Parliament or claiming to lead COPE while a court heard a pending lawsuit between the two factions. In the interim, Shilowa and his supporters boycotted COPE's campaign in the May 2011 local elections. The lawsuit finally concluded in October 2013, when the Johannesburg High Court upheld Lekota's claim to the COPE leadership, ruling that the December 2010 congress had been inquorate and therefore was incompetent to elect Shilowa as president.
In January 2014, COPE held its next national congress, defeating another lawsuit by Shilowa supporters who sought to interdict the congress; Willie Madisha was elected to replace Shilowa as Lekota's deputy. Ahead of the May 2014 general election, Shilowa announced publicly that he would support the campaign of the United Democratic Movement (UDM), another ANC breakaway party, though he did not himself officially join the UDM.
He is married to businesswoman Wendy Luhabe, who was one of COPE's early financiers and fundraisers. In addition to his children with Luhabe, Shilowa reportedly has two sons from a former customary marriage to Caroline Rikhotso; the youngest sued successfully for child support in 2007.
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