Stanley Mathabatha

Chupu Stanley Mathabatha (born 21 January 1957) is a South African politician and the current premier of the Limpopo province. Mathabatha is a former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) guerrilla, he is also the Provincial Chairperson of the African National Congress (ANC) in Limpopo Province since February 2014.

During the struggle
Stanley Mathabatha, a renowned MK cadre in the Motetema area under violent conditions precipitated mainly by the presence of the local police training academy. He joined politics at a tender age and became a member of the ANC's armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1977 at the age of 20 after the 1976 Soweto uprising and the same year that his close friend, Peter Mokaba was detained under the Terrorism Act.

In the 1980s, Stanley Mathabatha rose to become a prominent leader of the then United Democratic Front (UDF) and later he was part of the advanced youth detachment commonly known as the Young Lions of the North, the most revered, admired and feared by all and sundry. After the unbanning of political parties in 1990, Mathabatha became one of the key activists to rebuild the structure of the ANC internally and the Treasurer of the Northern Transvaal Region of the ANC in 1992. He has since served the ANC in various capacities in Limpopo.

After the struggle
After the end of apartheid, Mathabatha played a pivotal role in the consolidation and transformation of the then Bantustans administrations of Lebowa, Venda and Gazankulu and the Transvaal Provincial Administration (TPA) into the Northern Province Provincial Administration and later Limpopo.

Academic qualifications
Mathabatha has a BA Degree from the University of the Western Cape and a master's degree in Development (MDev) from the Graduate School of Leadership of the University of Limpopo. He also obtained an Executive Management Development Programme at Harvard University (USA) in 2003.

Post-apartheid
Chupu Stanley Mathabatha has over time perfected the art of public administration and evolved into a propeller for change in the developmental space and enterprise development in particular. Prior to his appointment as Chief Operations Officer of LimDev in March 2003, Stan Mathabatha was the General Manager of the SMME Directorate in the Provincial Department of Finance and Economic Development in Limpopo and has also worked as the technical advisor to the then MEC of Finance and Economic Development in 1994.

Diplomacy
He was appointed the Managing Director of LimDev from 2005 to 2010 and left to become an Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of South Africa in Ukraine (non-resident Ambassador in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova) in 2012.