Hailemariam congratulated Dlamini-Zuma on her win, and said he was confident in her role as commissioner.
“The task ahead could be arduous… but I am confident in her capacity to manage them,” Hailemariam said.
A medical doctor by training and a veteran of the fight against apartheid, Dlamini-Zuma has also served as South Africa’s health and foreign minister.
Born January 27, 1949, in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, Dlamini-Zuma took up politics in high school.
In the 1970s she went into exile, and studied in Britain at the universities of Bristol and Liverpool, while helping organise the anti-apartheid movement overseas.
She met Zuma while working as a paediatrician at a Swaziland hospital and became the polygamist president’s third wife in 1982. They divorced in 1998.
When the ban on the African National Congress was lifted in 1990, she returned home.
After the first democratic elections she was tapped by Mandela to transform the country’s segregated health system.
She is remembered for introducing legislation that overhauled the discriminatory system and gave the poor access to free basic care.
But she was also criticised for championing a controversial HIV drug that was later proved to be ineffective.
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