As opposition leader Mazibuko sued the Speaker of the National Assembly, challenging the prevailing parliamentary rules for motions of no confidence.

After the May 2014 general election, Mazibuko resigned from the National Assembly, saying that she was taking a temporary hiatus from frontline politics to pursue postgraduate education.

Thereafter she became the founder and chief executive officer of Futurelect, a non-profit organisation focused on civic education and skills development in African public service.

[2] When Mazibuko was aged six, her family returned to South Africa, moving to Umlazi, a township outside Durban in the former Natal Province (now KwaZulu-Natal).

To avoid the apartheid-era Bantu Education system, Mazibuko attended an independent Jewish primary school, Carmel College in Durban.

[2] Mazibuko had gone on international tours as a singer in her school choir, and she hoped to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama but wasn't able to afford it.

[7] On the racial point, she argued in 2009 that "the DA is definitely a white party" but would only remain unrepresentative for as long as black South Africans refused to join it.

[6] Shortly after she completed her thesis and graduated, Mazibuko was hired as a researcher in the DA's parliamentary caucus, having responded to a job advert in the Sunday Times.

Within weeks of the election, Mandy Rossouw reported that Mazibuko, aged 29, was a "rising star" in the DA, regarded as the party's presumptive future leader.

[14] Verashni Pillay said that her political rise was facilitated by her public speaking skills, thick skin and media savvy, and "a good dose of favour with a few powerful people" in the DA leadership.

[20] In something of a departure from precedent, the campaign was overtly public, rather than confined to internal appeals to other parliamentarians;[19] Mazibuko later said that she taken this approach intentionally, hoping to foster a culture of more democratic leadership selection in the DA.

[21] She said that the differences between her and Trollip were "methodological" rather than ideological or policy-related,[22] and the primary theme of her campaign was the DA's need for a younger, more energetic, and more racially representative leadership.

[19] Eusebius McKaiser argued that, Mazibuko's "infectious" enthusiasm notwithstanding, her public statements were overly focused on "vague, abstract values or responses to her identity", which he said neglected "substantive policy and intellectual detail in favour of the quick returns on a crisp sound bite".

[19][23] There were rumours that the DA's federal chairperson, James Selfe, campaigned for Mazibuko behind the scenes, urging Trollip to withdraw from the race and allow her to take office unopposed.

[5] Coetzee had lost the parliamentary leadership election to Trollip in 2009, leading insiders to nickname Mazibuko's campaign as "Ryan's revenge".

[24] This factional dimension, along with the public nature of the campaign, resulted in a fierce internal contest; in her memoirs, Zille wrote that, "There was blood on the floor before a single vote had been cast".

[24] According to Zille, she initially discouraged Mazibuko from standing, recognising that she had the requisite "intellect and political instinct" but nonetheless believing her to lack the experience needed for the job.

Mazibuko led the consortium of opposition parties to the Western Cape High Court, where they attempted to force the Speaker of the National Assembly, Max Sisulu, to break the deadlock and permit a debate.

[34] However, by the time new rules were passed in February 2014, Mazibuko had abandoned her original motion of no confidence, saying instead that she would seek to use Parliament's stronger power of impeachment.

[48] In December 2013, when Mazibuko appeared on a special South African edition of the BBC’s Question Time,[49] she was called a "house nigger" by another panel member, Andile Mngxitama.

[55] The overall ANC caucus also accused Mazibuko of being dressed in an "inappropriate manner" in an official statement released by the office of the Chief Whip of the National Assembly.

She said publicly that the vote had been a "plane crash", that "there was absolutely no excuse for the DA supporting Verwoerdian measures like that", and that Mazibuko "got it completely wrong".

In her account she had made the decision to leave during a September 2013 visit to Yale University, where she had recognised that such a sabbatical would allow her to "serve the DA and South Africa better" upon her return.

[80] Gavin Davis, the DA's communications director, implied that Mazibuko had perpetuated this account of events, pointing out that she was close to van Onselen and had not publicly refuted his claims.

[81] Conversely to van Onselen's account, Zille and her supporters suggested that Mazibuko was leaving due to her own declining popularity in the DA caucus.

Zille told Die Burger that Mazibuko was pursuing her "Plan B", Harvard, in the knowledge that she would have lost her office anyway if she stood for re-election as the DA's parliamentary leader.

[82] Other DA sources gave similar accounts to the Mail & Guardian, saying either that Mazibuko was set to lose the internal election or that her victory would come at the cost of a fierce and divisive contest, likely with Mmusi Maimane.

[86] She spent the second half of 2015 as a resident fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics,[87] where she convened a reading group on institution-building in post-conflict democratic transitions.

[93][94] In subsequent years the Apolitical Academy became Futurelect, a skills development non-profit focused on ethical leadership in African public service, and Mazibuko became its chief executive officer.