Janet Love

Biography

anet Yetta Love (born 21 December 1957) is a South African civil servant, activist and former politician who has served as vice-chairperson of the Electoral Commission of South Africa since 2018. Before her appointment to the Electoral Commission in 2016, she was a part-time commissioner at the South African Human Rights Commission from 2009 to 2016.

Quotes

• I think our upbringing was very coloured by my parents' history, in particular my mother. She was somebody who, at the age of 16, was taken into the ghettos and, subsequently, the concentration camps. She spent most of her time in a camp in Poland
• Her mother died in her arms, her sister died in her arms, her brother was executed, and she was dislocated from her father. The whole trauma of that, I think, was ever-present. So much of her make-up, I believe, was coloured by that
  • Janet Love talks about her background and her mother
• Intelligence training involved a lot of stuff to do with underground work, and then I went on a specialised course in Cuba to train on various aspects of perfecting disguises and on the construction of dead letter boxes
• There was a group of us; we were all prepared for different reasons and different things. I was the only one from that group who was part of the contingent that eventually got settled into the country and then joined up with Operation Vula
  • Janet Love speaks about her training in the military
• It became established in people's minds that I was hovering around somewhere in Zimbabwe, so by the time I was located in South Africa in 1987, my absence in areas where I had spent a lot of time before had already been explained away
• The disguise I came back in is not the disguise that I then wore on a longer-term basis. The extent to which you can disguise yourself also depends partly on what you're doing it for, but also partly on how long the disguise lasts
  • Janet Love on her disfuise back ito the country
• Elections are at the heart of democracy to make them free and fair, it’s a body that has to have the highest ethical standards, impartial, fair… it needs the means it needs transparency and it needs to ensure that what it does have resonance
• Challenges with regard to participation and that’s very much in terms of youth. Secondly, there’s a big trust deficit generally in all state institutions and unfortunately, the Commission does not escape that and thirdly, the contestation, the emotion that is part of that contestation is a lot sharper. So because of those three things, the Commission has to take on board things that it may not have had to prioritise in the same way historically
  • Janet Love on adhering to highest ethical standards for elections