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On Friday, 19th of October, Baleka Mbete Speaker of South Africa's National Assembly, which is the lower house of the Parliament in Cape Town, arrived in Rabat to meet her Moroccan counterpart, Habib El Malki.
Mbete is a powerful politician who held several senior positions in her country. Between September 2008 and May 2009, she was Deputy President of South Africa. She is also an influential member at the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party in South Africa.
The second visit of a South African senior official to Morocco in 2018
She was also seen as a potential successor of Jacob Zuma at the African National Congress party. In Rabat, Mbete held a meeting with the Speaker of the Moroccan House of Representatives Habib El Malki.
The trip of the Speaker of the National Assembly in South Africa is aiming at improving diplomatic relations between the two countries, as it was initiated in November 2017 by King Mohammed VI and President Jacob Zuman in Abidjan, which was hosting at the moment the African Union-European Union summit.
In January, the South African Minister of Foreign Affairs was in Morocco. Maité Nkoana-Mashabane visited Rabat to take part in a ministerial conference on migration. It was the first official visit of a Foreign Minister from Pretoria to the Kingdom in 2018.
In Rabat, Mashabane held talks with her Moroccan counterpart, Nasser Bourita.The timing of Ms. Mbete's trip to Morocco is significant as it comes only a few days after a South African diplomat visited the Tindouf camps and Algeria.
