MEC Profile

Khabisi Mosunkutu, MEC for Gauteng Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Environment

Elias Khabisi Mosunkutu was born on the 11 0ctober 1950 and grew up in Pimville Soweto. He completed his high school education at the Musi High School .

After matriculation, MEC Mosunkutu studied telecommunications through the then Department of Post & Telecommunication's technical college. Subsequent to this training he joined the then Department of Post & Telecommunications as a qualified technician.

His political consciousness and the terrible working conditions under which employees of the then Department of Post & Telecommunications (P&T) worked, inspired him, together with his colleagues, to form the first genuine trade union movement in the history of the Department of P&T. Prior to the formation of this trade union, workers interests were 'articulated' by management created liaison committees. Subsequent to the formation of this union, the Post & Telecommunications Workers Union (POTWA), he was elected its first secretary general.

Under his stewardship, POTWA became an affiliate of COSATU, a move that clearly set the union apart from the toothless liaison committees whose meaningless existence was encouraged by the conservative apartheid era management of the Department.

He rose through the ranks, in his employment, until he was a senior technician. His involvement in the trade union movement did not cease either. He was elected the president of the union, a position to which he repeatedly was re-elected into until he was called by the African National Congress to serve in Parliament as a Member of Parliament (MP). He was an MP from 1994 till 1995 when he joined the Gauteng Provincial Government as a Member of the Provincial Legislature (MPL).

Whilst still a shop steward and trade union leader, he was deployed to serve in the Board of Directors of Telkom SA, this was after the Department of P&T had been restructured and was also now under the political leadership of the first democratic dispensation.

As an MP, Mr. Mosunkutu served in the trade and industry and the telecommunications committees of parliament. As an MPL, Mr. Mosunkutu chaired the Provincial Government's Standing Committee on Public Transport, Roads and Works. He subsequently was appointed as a Member of the Executive Council (MEC) responsible for the Department of Public Transport, Roads and Works. He held this position from 1999 until 2004. It is during this period that he earned himself the nickname 'Shisa Mpama'. The name reputedly arises from the fact that he was known to brook no nonsense from unruly taxi operators. Many such operators faced 'dry' periods when they could not eke a living as taxi operators. This would usually be because he had clamped down hard on unruliness and downright criminality. These were times when extra-ordinary measures were required to deal with criminal elements in the taxi industry who were bent on turning taxi ranks and routes into veritable killing fields.

MEC Mosunkutu now serves as the Gauteng MEC for Agriculture, Conservation and Environment, a position he still holds.