MAIN PHOTO: DUDUZANE ZUMA
Staff Reporter
Jacob Zuma has once again put his family at the centre of the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party, appointing his son Duduzane as the party’s first deputy president in a sweeping leadership reshuffle. The move places Duduzane directly below his father in the party hierarchy and has revived long-running claims that MK operates less like a political party and more like a family enterprise. For readers trying to keep up, here is a reminder of how the party got to this point.
Duduzile’s rise and fall
Long before Duduzane’s promotion, it was his twin sister, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, who held real sway inside MK. She left the ANC to join her father’s new party in 2023, campaigned alongside him, and was sworn in as an MP in June 2024, later also taking a seat in the Pan-African Parliament. Within the party’s inner circle, she was widely seen as one of the most influential Zumas after her father himself, and some members complained that she benefited from favouritism and uneven discipline.
That influence unravelled through 2025 and 2026. In November 2025, Duduzile resigned as an MP amid allegations that she helped recruit young South African men, including family members, for what they believed was bodyguard training, only for some of them to end up fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The party described the resignation as voluntary. Months later, in June 2026, MK went further and formally expelled her from the party altogether, alongside an ally, over separate allegations that the pair acted without authorisation in moving a gravely ill MP to another facility before his death. Announcing the expulsion, the party’s secretary-general insisted MK was “not a family stokvel,” a pointed rejection of the idea that the Zumas were untouchable.
Even so, the expulsion has not settled the debate. Critics note that Duduzile had already been stripped of her positions and had resigned once before under a cloud, only to remain visibly close to her father throughout, fuelling scepticism among some observers about how final her exit really is.
Enter Duduzane
Duduzile’s twin brother, Duduzane, had spent years trying to build his own political profile, including an unsuccessful push within the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal and a stated ambition to contest the presidency. He had never held elected office. That changed with his father’s latest reshuffle, which removed several senior MK figures, including the party’s previous first deputy president, and installed Duduzane in that role instead, placing him ahead of veterans who had helped build MK into a major political force after the 2024 election.
Spare a thought for Hlophe
If anyone has whiplash from the reshuffle, it’s John Hlophe. He was suspended as MK’s deputy president and parliamentary leader back in November 2025, after removing chief whip Colleen Makhubele and installing MP Des van Rooyen in her place without first running it past Zuma, who happened to be out of the country in Burkina Faso at the time. An independent legal panel investigated, and in March 2026 Zuma reinstated him to both posts after what the party described as a lengthy one-on-one where the allegations were “ventilated at length.”
Barely five months later, he was demoted again, this time to make way for Duduzane, and this time with no allegations attached at all. Zuma’s statement on the removal was, if anything, warmer than the one that accompanied his reinstatement, thanking Hlophe for his “leadership, dedication and invaluable contribution” and wishing him well, even as he kept the far more junior post of parliamentary leader. He was reinstated with a full inquiry and a personal audience with the president; he was pushed out again with a thank-you note. Whatever the real reason for the second demotion, MK hasn’t offered one, which rather suggests the vacancy, not Hlophe’s conduct, was the point.
Twins at the centre of it all
Duduzane and Duduzile are twins, both children of Jacob Zuma and his late wife Kate Mantsho. Their intertwined, and at times diverging, paths inside MK, one now expelled, the other elevated to the party’s second-highest office, are central to why questions about the party being a Zuma family project keep resurfacing.
The bigger picture
The latest reshuffle went beyond the deputy presidency, touching MK’s chairperson, deputy secretary-general and other senior roles, while Zuma also dissolved the party’s Strategic Presidential Team and reinstated a Presidential Task Team under his own direct control. Taken together, the changes have tightened Zuma’s grip over MK’s politics, administration and finances, even as one of his children exits the party under a disciplinary cloud and another steps into its second-highest position.
