Mazibuko Jara is the Executive Director of Zabalaza Pathways Institute. He is a pan-Africanist popular educator, strategist, activist, commentator and respected national and regional voice with three decades of experience in deepening democracy, municipal reform, gender justice, land reform, ecological justice, HIV/AIDS access, and LGBTQIA+ rights. He co-founded the Treatment Action Campaign (which won universal Antiretroviral access), is the former National Director of the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (which secured LGBTQIA+ constitutional rights), and founding Board Chair of Oxfam South Africa. He works with popular movements to reclaim democratic institutions, deepen participatory democracy, and advance a people-driven just transition. Mazibuko has facilitated collaborations with movements, universities, and think tanks in Southern Africa, Brazil, India, and the US. Mazibuko has also been active in left politics in South Africa through the South African Communist Party, the Young Communist League, and the Democratic Left Front.
Organization vision: To achieve just, loving societies free from poverty and based on zero-carbon economies, where ordinary people are organized, empowered, and in democratic control of their livelihoods, development, and resources.
The Zabalaza Pathways Institute (ZPI) is a bold strategic response to the deepening crises facing Southern Africa’s post-colonial societies. Decades after apartheid and colonialism, democracy has been hollowed out, captured by corrupt elites and conservative alliances that use power for private gain while entrenching poverty and inequality, systemic economic injustice, patriarchy, xenophobia and repression. Institutions are weakened, poverty and unemployment persist, ecological collapse looms, and ordinary people remain excluded from control over politics, the economy, and natural resources. Popular movements exist, but they are fragmented, under-resourced, and often confined to short-term, single-issue struggles. ZPI offers a transformative alternative. They believe real and lasting change will not come from above but through organised, democratic, and mass-based grassroots power. Their mission is to catalyze and sustain people’s agency, building a critical mass of bottom-up organization capable of shifting society onto a new trajectory. ZPI works to move communities and movements beyond reactive protest toward strategic, long-term programmes for systemic transformation. ZPI stands with marginalized communities, women, LGBTQIA+ groups, rural people and workers, helping to turn their fears, frustrations and hopes into organised, collective action. By uniting local struggles into a broader movement, ZPI charts pathways toward genuine democracy, justice and ecological renewal.
