The spectacular climb of David Mabuza, the country’s new deputy president, included siphoning money from schools and other public services to amass vast power, officials say.

By Norimitsu Onishi & Selam Gebrekidan @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 4

MIDDELPLAAS, South Africa — [....] Hundreds of parents, enraged that their warnings about the dilapidated school had been ignored for years, burst into protest a couple of days later, upending their quiet rural town for two weeks last August. They burned tires, blocked roads and demanded justice from the provincial government led by David Mabuza, a former math teacher who had become one of the most powerful figures in the African National Congress and was positioning himself to become South Africa’s deputy president.

One of the party’s historic promises had been to provide a good education for black people, who had been deliberately denied the opportunity under apartheid [....]  

But under the A.N.C., the education system has been in shambles, so gutted by corruption that even party officials are dismayed at how little students are learning, in schools so decrepit that children have plunged to their deaths in pit toilets.

The rage in Ziyanda’s town grew so intense that protesters hurled stones at a local A.N.C. leader, who narrowly escaped by whipping out his handgun and shooting randomly into the crowd, wounding two children and roiling the community all the more [....]