Siyabonga Cwele

Siyabonga Cyprian Cwele (born 3 September 1958) is a South African politician who served in the cabinet of South Africa from September 2008 to May 2019, most recently as the Minister of Home Affairs between 2018 and 2019. He was appointed as the South African Ambassador to China in December 2020. He is a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and represented the party in Parliament from 1994 to 2019.

A medical doctor by training, Cwele joined the ANC underground during apartheid in 1984. In the 1994 general election, he was elected to the KwaZulu-Natal delegation of the National Council of Provinces, where he served for a single term before joining the National Assembly. He chaired Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence between 2004 and 2008.

In September 2008, he was appointed to the cabinet of President Kgalema Motlanthe, who named him as Minister of Intelligence. He remained in that office until May 2014, though President Jacob Zuma renamed it as the Minister of State Security in May 2009. From May 2014 to November 2018, he was the Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services under Zuma and his successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, and he went on to serve a brief stint as Ramaphosa's Minister of Home Affairs from November 2018 to May 2019. After the 2019 general election, he was excluded from Ramaphosa's second cabinet and resigned from his legislative seat.

Cwele was a member of the ANC National Executive Committee from December 2012 to December 2022. Before that, he served in the Provincial Executive Committee in KwaZulu-Natal between 1990 and 2012.

Cwele was born on 3 September 1958 at KwaMachi near Harding in what became KwaZulu Natal province. He graduated from the University of KwaZulu-Natal with an MBChB in 1984 and he later completed an MPhil in economic policy from the University of Stellenbosch.

Between 1984 and 1990, he served in underground structures of the African National Congress (ANC), which at the time was banned by the apartheid government. After the party was unbanned in 1990, he was elected to the inaugural Provincial Executive Committee of the ANC's new KwaZulu-Natal branch; he remained a member of the committee for over two decades thereafter.

In the April 1994 general election, South Africa's first under universal suffrage, Cwele was elected to represent the ANC in the Senate of South Africa, soon renamed the National Council of Provinces. He represented the KwaZulu-Natal constituency. He served only a single term in his seat: in the next general election in June 1999, he was elected instead to the National Assembly, the upper house of Parliament. He was a backbencher, again representing the KwaZulu-Natal constituency, until after the 2004 general election, when the ANC nominated him to chair the Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence.

On 25 September 2008, recently elected President Kgalema Motlanthe announced that Cwele would be appointed to his cabinet as Minister of Intelligence, a position vacated by the resignation of Ronnie Kasrils. In the April 2009 general election, Motlanthe was succeeded by President Jacob Zuma, who renamed Cwele's position as the Minister of State Security, to align with the newly restructured State Security Agency (SSA).