At the conference, held in December 2017, Mabuza was elected Deputy President of the ANC, serving under Cyril Ramaphosa.

[1][3] While studying at the University of South Africa for his Bachelor of Arts in psychology, which he earned in 1989, he began work as a schoolteacher.

Mabuza served in that position until 1998, when Phosa fired him after a scandal in which it emerged that the province's 1998 matric results had been fraudulently inflated by twenty percentage points.

[3] In 2001, he left his provincial positions to serve a three-year stint in the national Parliament; he returned to the Mpumalanga legislature from 2004 to 2007.

[6] Over the same period, Mabuza ascended through the provincial ranks of his political party, the African National Congress (ANC).

[9] He and an informal slate of allies, who were also elected to the party's provincial executive, ran an "Mpumalanga First" campaign that was described as populist and xenophobic insofar as it entailed castigating Mabuza's predecessors for giving government jobs to people from outside the province, especially from urban Gauteng.

[9] The campaign was supported by local branches of the ANC Youth League, South African National Civics Organisation, and Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans' Association.

[9] Mabuza's victory was also linked in some analyses to his support for Zuma: his predecessor, Makwetla, was one of several pro-Mbeki provincial chairs who were replaced with pro-Zuma figures during that period.

[17] For much of the next decade, Mabuza held both positions concurrently: he remained Premier until February 2018, and he chaired the ANC in the province until 2017, winning re-election in 2012 despite an attempt to unseat him.

Between 2012 and 2017, Mpumalanga, one of South Africa's smaller provinces, jumped from being the ANC's fourth-largest region to being its second-largest (behind KwaZulu-Natal).

[12][13] This meant that the province would be allocated more voting delegates at the ANC's future National Conferences, and would therefore have more influence over leadership selection and policy determination in the party.

members with government contracts, cash handouts and even KFC meals", but some of his opponents claimed that the Mpumalanga leadership had artificially inflated its membership figures.

A spokesman explained, "The premier was gravely ill and was not in a position to easily walk or carry himself on to a national airline".

[4] Mabuza, with the second-largest number of delegates, was viewed as particularly powerful, especially as he declined to endorse whole-heartedly either of the two frontrunners, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.

This was especially plausible because the other Premier League members were aligned to her and because her supporters seemed to view Mabuza as her informal running mate.

[32]On 26 February 2018, he was appointed Deputy President of South Africa by Ramaphosa, who had replaced Zuma following his resignation.

[1] The policy priorities delegated to him by President Ramaphosa include land reform, anti-poverty initiatives, and rural and township economic empowerment.

[42] When questioned further in 2022, Mabuza said that there was "nothing sinister" about the trip, that its purpose had been medical rather than political, and that it had had no bearing on government policy on energy contracts or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In the first incident, on 27 July, a collision on the N1 in Midrand hospitalised two of his protection officers with minor injuries, but Mabuza was not in any of the vehicles.

[52] On 1 March 2023, it was revealed that Mabuza had resigned as a Member of Parliament the previous day, ending his tenure as deputy president of South Africa.

[56] Africa Report later linked the story to rumours that, during the period in which the theft had taken place, several Mpumalanga politicians had received kickbacks related to the construction of the Mbombela Stadium ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

[58] Phosa said that he had seen the document and had forwarded it to ANC Deputy Secretary General Jessie Duarte, but denied involvement in its publication.

[13][59] In August 2018, in a lengthy exposé, the New York Times reported that while Premier Mabuza had built a network of political patronage in Mpumalanga by artificially inflating, and carefully distributing, contracts to build schools in the province – a strategy facilitated by his Rapid Implementation Unit – and thereby strengthened his political base at the expense of the public service delivery.

Mabuza was linked to the assassination of Sammy Mpatlanyane, a government official who was shot in 2010 after he refused to sign off on controversial tenders.

[74] In addition, Mzilikazi wa Afrika, a Sunday Times journalist who reported extensively on the killings and the claims of the alleged hitman, was arrested in August 2010 on a forgery charge laid by Mabuza, later dropped.

[75][76] In 2014, two men from Mbombela claimed that they had been members of a "dirty tricks" task team formed by Mabuza to suppress allegations that he was involved in political killings; they had been offered R3 million and jobs in the government and had been instructed to steal documents from Nkabule.

In 2016, he told a journalist, "One day, people will get clarity when they lay hands on privileged information I have about the political murders...

"[6] In 2017, ahead of the ANC's 54th National Conference, Mathews Phosa told eNCA that Mabuza had a "private army" in Mpumalanga.

[80] At the time, Phosa was instituting a court challenge against the Mpumalanga ANC, believing that there had been improper conduct in the process by which it had nominated candidates for election at the 54th National Conference.