Janet Love

Janet Love, the newest appointment to the Electoral Commission, has dedicated her working life to public service.

Having played a role in fighting for freedom as an anti-apartheid activist in the 1970s, Ms Love returned to South Africa in 1990 and immediately became involved in negotiating South Africa’s new constitution and establishing its first government.

She was a member of the management team at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) and also served as the Deputy Executive Director of the Transitional Executive Committee. This Committee was responsible for, among others, developing and overseeing the work of critical areas of government to enable elections to proceed under direction of the 1994 Independent Electoral Commission.

Ms Love served as a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress in the first democratic Parliament from 1994 to 1999, and was a member of the 22-person Constitutional Committee of the Constitutional Assembly, the body responsible for steering the constitution-making process.

Ms Love then served in various government and civil society institutions, including working in the South African Reserve Bank for five years as head of strategic analysis dealing with various security risks relating to cash that affected South Africa’s financial stability

Ms Love has a strong commitment to human rights and in her capacity as National Director of the Legal Resources Centre since 2006 she has taken up public interest and constitutional cases on behalf of marginalised communities and individuals

Before joining the Electoral Commission as a part-time Commissioner, Ms Love also served a seven-year term (2009 to 2016) as a part-time member of the South African Human Rights Commission, a Chapter 9 institution tasked with safeguarding South Africa’s democracy.

Ms Love studied through the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of London and has post-graduate qualifications in public administration, development management and economics.