Barbara Creecy jokingly says she was a "fossil" in the Gauteng legislature before being appointed the new minister of the environment, forestry & fisheries. But she's more like a rare species: an experienced and tireless politician who won't rest till she gets results.
As an MEC in Gauteng she led three departments at different times: education, finance, and sports, recreation, arts & culture. Under Creecy's leadership the finance and e-government departments won 12 awards for excellence and innovation. Gauteng schools received the top matric results twice while Creecy was the province's MEC for education, and the pass rate in state township schools went up by 10%.
Creecy's office in parliament is uncluttered, not because she has moved province but because that's how she rolls. In her first budget briefing the new cabinet minister was on top of her game. Asked, for example, about declaring a climate emergency, she replied in a friendly exchange: "How would declaring a climate crisis help to improve the implementation of solutions? What we want is solutions."
The hot topic of climate change - specifically how to achieve a just transition to cleaner energy while keeping jobs and the lights on - will be a priority on her watch.
Deployed as an ANC national executive committee member to the Witbank and Secunda region since 2018, Creecy says: "In every house I went into, I would see men wearing the same overalls, of Eskom or Sasol or the mines. You really get a sense of the dominance of the mining sector and the power sector there."
But the biggest employers in the highveld area of Mpumalanga are also the biggest polluters. Creecy has approached the minister of energy & mineral resources about reviewing the implementation of the air-quality management plans in this industrial belt, and is reviewing drafts of the proposed climate change bill.
She will also be reviewing plans for the oceans, fisheries, waste and biodiversity sectors.
Facts, not sentiment, will set her agenda. A high-level scientific panel has been appointed to analyse pressing conservation issues, including the poaching of rhino and the exploitative canned lion-hunting industry. The minister will wait for the panel's reports before making decisions.
"You have to be guided by science and make evidence-based decisions because otherwise one is tempted to make personal decisions," she says.
Once she has the information, Creecy acts. After whales were trapped in the lines of octopus fishermen last month, she suspended their licences. Before making decisions about the controversial fishing permit system, however, she will study the scientific reviews.
With an MSc in public policy & management from the University of London, as well as military training, Creecy's approach is disciplined and rational. Take her budget speech: how do you convince everyone - not only green activists and young people - to care about the environment? You demonstrate that millions of South Africans rely on natural resources for jobs.
"What I want to bring to this portfolio is the understanding that caring for the environment, caring about climate change and threats to biodiversity, may well be an emotional concern for some people, but 2-million South Africans are directly dependent on our natural resources," she says.
And an estimated 16-million more people are reliant on those breadwinners.
"We are all dependent on a stable source of water, the effective management of floods and droughts, and a decent quality of air," says Creecy. "This is not just the agenda for my speech but the agenda for the five-year term."
Improving water security by protecting key water sources is a priority for her. "Nature can supply water much more cheaply than humans can," she says. Clearing invasive alien plant species from Cape Town's water catchment areas would increase its water supply by about a sixth and cost a fraction of what it would to build desalination plants or tow in icebergs.
You can take the 'school prefect' approach or how do I help you' approach. I've found the latter more effective
Creecy hopes to expand protection for water catchments, wetlands and sensitive ecosystems.
She points out that stopping environmental degradation doesn't always require money. On a rainy July 18 she joined a Nelson Mandela Day cleanup in Athlone, Cape Town, organised by the WWF-SA. This sort of initiative makes a difference, especially if you inspire young people to take the lead.
"School children are notoriously effective at getting their parents to do what the kids want them to do," says Creecy. "If you want to deal with issues like waste separation at source, a nagging child is probably the most effective resource you could have."
Partners are also vital, however. "When I started at the Gauteng department of sports, recreation, arts & culture we had a budget of R90m and 15 policy areas. If you don't have money, what do you have? What you have in that sector is nongovernmental organisations in abundance," says Creecy.
"Once we had a plan, we could mobilise people in a common direction to achieve big things."
She hopes to do the same in the environmental sector. "It is replete with a lot of NGOs, with amazing people giving amazing amounts of time and a lot of private-sector social responsibility."
Collaboration and communication are key to the efficient functioning of any bureaucracy. When she was Gauteng MEC for finance, Creecy strengthened co-operation across tiers of government and between departments.
Of her new role, she says one of the skills she has to offer is making programmes "more systematic and more interlinked. You can take the 'school prefect' approach or the 'how do I help you' approach. I have found the latter to be more effective."
So far she has nothing but praise for the department she has inherited. The team dealing with the stack of appeals that lands on her desk every week - containing complaints about everything from a new mine to the development of a beachfront hotel - is excellent and thorough, she says.
When Creecy takes up a new position, her first priority is to study the five-year forecast and annual performance targets to find out "what are we actually doing and how to get better outcomes".
Closely related to this is finance and how resources are allocated to implement the department's goals.
"You have to follow the money," she says. "Often you can say something is a priority but something else gets the biggest budget."
She has had the same sense of clarity and focus in her own life from an early age. Her own path has been clear to her since her first year at Wits University, she says.
That was in 1976. On June 16 that year, Creecy heard on the student radio about the deadly shootings in Soweto. That afternoon she protested with students on Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg.
She joined the National Union of South African Students and was recruited to the ANC in Lesotho while attending a conference in her honours year in 1979.
"I would get a message to go and collect somebody at Park Station, look after them for the night and drop them off the next morning," she says of her initial role in providing safe houses.
Following a crackdown in Lesotho, Creecy became involved with ANC structures in Botswana and with the emerging organisations that ultimately formed the United Democratic Front (UDF). From 1983, she worked for the UDF's civic desk, where she helped organise teachers into activist groups and was a pillar of the Detainees' Parents Support Committee.
In the late '80s, the ANC sent Creecy to the Soviet Union for training in military combat.
The organisation was unbanned soon after her return and Creecy then worked for the Human Awareness Programme, an NGO that provided training in problem-solving and other skills for organisations committed to democracy.
She was elected to the Gauteng legislature in 1994 and since then has served in government without interruption, while raising three children (a son born in 1991 and two younger daughters).
"I do not have an enormous amount of free time," she says wryly. "I work up to 12 hours a day but I exercise every day. I walk and do yoga and eat properly. It keeps me sane."
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