Lyndall Fanisa Shope-Mafole (née Shope; born 1957 or 1958) is a South African politician and former civil servant who was the general secretary of the Congress of the People (COPE) from 2014 to 2019.
Born into the African National Congress (ANC) to anti-apartheid stalwarts Mark and Gertude Shope, Shope-Mafole was raised and educated in exile during apartheid.
[1] According to Shope-Mafole, when she was at high school in Zambia, she qualified to compete in the Olympics but was unable to participate because she could not represent South Africa, her home country.
[1] She completed a Master of Science in telecommunications engineering at the José Antonio Echeverría Higher Institute of Technology in Havana, Cuba, in 1983,[7] and she returned to South Africa in the 1990s during the democratic transition.
[6] During an advanced stage of the transition, in March 1994,[8] Shope-Mafole was appointed as a member of the inaugural council of the new Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA); her term was renewed by Parliament in 1996.
[12] Although she and the other councillors initially held a press conference at which they said they would not resign,[12] they were forced to do so later in 1997 after facing heavy criticism from Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts.
[13] In February 1999, she was appointed as South Africa's permanent representative to the ITU in Geneva, formally a diplomatic posting with close ties to Naidoo's ministry.
[18] The national convention, held in early November 2008, led ultimately to the formation of the Congress of the People (COPE), a new opposition party.
[24] She said that she accepted that she had been given the job as "a deployed cadre" but argued that her contract with the state remained in place until September 2010; she said, "I will continue to implement government policy and just do political work the way other people play golf.
[25][26] In the weeks after her resignation from the civil service, the Mail & Guardian reported that COPE was considering Shope-Mafole as a possible candidate for election as Premier of the North West.
[35] In 2016, she was one of 27 former director-generals who signed an open letter calling for a public inquiry to investigate allegations of state capture during the presidency of Jacob Zuma.