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Meet our new First Lady

Review found out more about the First Lady and her plans during a recent one-on-one interview.

Having only been back in the province for a month she has already taken the bull by the horns as First Lady of Limpopo.

As a result of the appointment of her husband, Stanley Mathabatha, as premier, Margaret Mathabatha has many new responsibilities.

Review found out more about the First Lady and her plans during a recent one-on-one interview. “It is an honour and a privilege to be given the opportunity to serve the people and to meet people of different characters; something that I enjoy the most. I am fully aware that I must now double my efforts in offering the premier the necessary support that will help execute the mandate bestowed on him by the ruling party,” she says.

Mathabatha was born in Pretoria and started school in Vosloorus in 1968 and matriculated at Illinge High School.

She obtained her Bachelor of Primary Education degree at the University of Western Cape in 1990 and in 2011 she obtained her Master’s Degree at Turfloop Graduate School. She taught at various schools before she joined the Office of the Premier as a deputy manager in 1999. Later she moved to the department of economic development, environment and tourism as a manager of service delivery improvement.

Mathabatha arrived back in Limpopo from the Ukraine, where her husband was the South African ambassador, last month. “We were one of the very few black people in Ukraine, so everyone wanted to take pictures with us. It was very difficult to communicate with people there. Lucky for me, the fact that I know sign language really came in handy for us,” she says.

Mathabatha says her first priority is to resuscitate the First Lady’s Charity Trust as a vehicle to improve the lives of needy people, especially rural women, children and people with disabilities. “There is a need to provide the necessary support to projects or cooperatives involving rural women and people with disabilities, and also to initiate and start more projects of this nature, where they do not exist.

“These projects must also be sustainable so that going forward they must function on their own, and assist in the creation of jobs to our people,” Mathabatha says.

This mother of three enjoys time with her family and reading political literature and love stories when she has free time.

She encourages women to support each other and to utilise all available opportunities to empower themselves. “As they say: you support a woman, you support the nation, so let there be no field in which we feel we can’t be equal to any challenge should the opportunity present itself.”

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