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Sandra Botha: Leader of the Opposition in Parliament
Sandra Botha matriculated at Parys Secondary School in the Free State where she was awarded an American Field Service Scholarship which enabled her to attend a year’s schooling in New York. At Stellenbosch University, she obtained her BA Degree in Economics and later studied Sesotho and Linguistics through UNISA. It is at Stellenbosch where her political awareness already manifested itself, when she served as a committee member of the Student’s Current Affairs Club.
To this day, Sandra is remembered with fondness in Rammulotsi, the local Viljoenskroon township, for establishing a branch of Operation Hunger, by means of which she managed to provide supplementary food to 3000 people a week till the end of that program’s existence. Her record of non-racial activism also includes being a founding trustee of the famous Ntataise Pre-school Training Facility of Hunter’s Vlei farm, where hundreds of disadvantaged farm women were – and still are being – trained as pre-school teachers for participating farms across South Africa.
Her political career includes her appointment as Deputy Director of the Independent Electoral Commission in the Free State in 1998. After the 1999 election she was selected as the Free State Democratic Party Representative to the National Council of Provinces where she was appointed Caucus Leader from 2000-2004. In 2004, the Free State Electoral College of the DA placed Sandra first on the National Assembly list and in the same year she became the first DA MP to be elected as House Chairperson of the National Assembly. In May 2007 Sandra was elected as the parliamentary leader for the Democratic Alliance.
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ABOUT THE DA
