Pallo Jordan

Zweledinga Pallo Jordan (born 22 May 1942) is a South African politician. He was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, and was a cabinet minister from 1994 until 2009.

Early life Jordan is the son of the academics Archibald Campbell Jordan and Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan. Like his parents, Jordan was active in the Non-European Unity Movement against apartheid. He then joined the ANC and went into exile, studying in Britain and the United States.

Political career Jordan worked for the ANC in London and in African states. In 1982 he narrowly escaped the detonation of the letter bomb which the apartheid regime had sent to Ruth First and killed her.

In 1985, he was elected to the ANC's National Executive Committee (NEC). He served as administrative secretary of the NEC Secretariat (1985–1988), on the NEC's Strategy and Tactics Committee as convenor (1985–1989), on the NEC's sub-committee on negotiations and the NEC's sub-committee on Constitutional Guidelines and as the Director of Information and Publicity (1989).

Jordan returned to South Africa after the unbanning of the ANC in 1990. Having already participated in the 1987 negotiations in Senegal, he was also a negotiator in the CODESA.

2009 scandal According to his official biographies, he studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States and at the London School of Economics (LSE), but a newspaper investigation revealed that he did not complete his degree at Wisconsin–Madison. On 11 August 2014, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe announced that Jordan had resigned from Parliament and apologised to the ruling party after reports that his qualifications were false.