The South African Cabinet has appointed Lyndall Shope-Mafole as director-general of the Department of Communications, the department`s highest-ranking public servant.
Shope-Mafole is chairman of the President`s National Committee for Information Society for Africa`s Development and will continue to hold that post.
The director-general post has been filled on a temporary basis since the previous incumbent, Andile Ngcaba, left in January to take up a position as chairman designate of Dimension Data SA.
Ngcaba held the post for eight years and was the longest serving director-general within the public service.
Trained in Cuba as a telecommunications engineer, Shope-Mafole has held numerous government posts related to the ICT sector. These include general manager for international telecommunications policy and minister plenipotentiary for communications at the South African embassy in Paris.
Shope-Mafole was deputy president of the ANC`s Youth League from 1990 to 1992 and throughout the past decade was involved in formulating telecommunications policy for government and non-governmental organisations.
From 1994 to 1997, Shope-Mafole was a councillor for the Independent Broadcasting Authority, a member of the Media Monitoring Project, and a director of the Centre for Development of Information and Telecommunications Policy. She also chaired the National Telecommunications Forum.
Her international positions include being a member of the restructuring implementation team of the Pan-African Telecommunications Union and a member of the Group of Experts of the common Telecommunications Policy Framework for the South African Development Community.
Shope-Mafole is attending the Highway Africa Conference at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape.
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