Richard Dyantyi

Dyantyi was born on 25 October 1968 in Burgersdorp in present-day Eastern Cape (then part of the Cape Province).[1] His home language is Xhosa.[1] His mother, who was divorced from his father, was a domestic worker, and as a child he lived with his grandparents, who were farm labourers.[2] He matriculated in 1989 from All Saints College in Bisho, a private school which he attended on a scholarship and where he was first-team rugby captain.[2]

After matriculating, he joined his mother in Khayelitsha outside Cape Town. From 1991, he began volunteering at Black Sash's advice office in Khayelitsha, and he later joined the ANC.[2] Ahead of South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, he served the party as an election organiser.[2] He spent five years as a researcher at the Foundation for Contemporary Research before joining the Tygerberg Municipality in 1999, shortly before it was amalgamated into the new City of Cape Town municipality.[2]

After the 2004 general election, he joined the Western Cape Provincial Parliament, representing the ANC.[3] On 26 July 2005, in a cabinet reshuffle by incumbent Premier Ebrahim Rasool, he was additionally appointed to the Provincial Cabinet of the Western Cape as Provincial Minister (MEC) for Local Government and Housing.[4] In this position, he became known in South African municipal politics after he had led an unsuccessful effort in 2006 to replace the Unicity government of the City of Cape Town with a centralised executive mayor system, which would have stripped the current mayor of the municipality, Helen Zille, of her powers as mayor.

Viewed as a political ally of Premier Rasool,[5] he was fired from the Executive Council on 31 July 2008, shortly after Lynne Brown succeeded Rasool as Premier.[6] However, he remained an ordinary Member of the Provincial Parliament. He was re-elected to his final term in the provincial legislature in the 2014 general election, ranked fourth on the ANC's provincial party list.[7]

In the 2019 general election, Dyantyi did not seek re-election to the provincial legislature but was instead elected to the National Assembly, the lower house of the South African Parliament; he was ranked fourth on the ANC's provincial-to-national party list for the Western Cape.[7] On 20 July 2021, he was elected unopposed to chair the assembly's Committee for the Section 194 Enquiry into the fitness to hold office of the incumbent Public Protector, Busisiwe Mkhwebane.[8]

Public Protector at the time, Busisiwe Mkhwebane, laid a complaint against three ANC MPs, Dyantyi, Pemmy Majodina and Tina Joemat-Pettersson with Parliament's Joint Committee on Ethics and Members' Interests. This came after Mkhwebane's husband alleged that Joemat-Pettersson approached him for a R600 000 bribe for the three to influence the outcome of the Section 194 Enquiry into the fitness of Mkhwebane to hold office.; he also laid a complaint with the police.[9] The Committee cleared Dyantyi and Majodina saying the claim was unfounded.[10]

He is a single father to three sons.[2]

• Mr Qubudile Richard Dyantyi at People's Assembly
• Mr Qubudile Richard Dyantyi at Parliament of South Africa
• "Richard Dyantyi is seeking a bloodless coup d'etat" at Cape Argus (2006-09-22).