Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe . South African politician, vice-president of the African National Congress political party and elected President of the country in September of 2008 replacing Thabo Mbeki . A hermetic man in everything related to his private life within a reserved personality, and affectionately nicknamed Mkhulu (grandfather, in Zulu, despite not being in his sixties, a condition he acquired in July 2009), it is known that Motlanthe is married and He is the father of three children, and he is a huge jazz fan .
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Representative of the ANC in South African trade unionism
- 2 Rise in the hierarchy of the party and interim president of the Republic
- 2 Personal life
- 3 Sources
Biographical synthesis
Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe was born on 19 of July of 1949 South African politician, vice-president of the African National Congress political party and elected President of the country in September of 2008 replacing Thabo Mbeki . Motlanthe is a former student activist, ex-unionist and former soldier in the ANC’s military arm, UmKhonto we Sizwe. In 1977 he was sentenced to ten years in prison and imprisoned on Robben Island along with Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma , under the racist apartheid regime. Motlanthe fully served her sentence. In April of 1987He recovered his freedom and decided to join the trade union movement linked to the ANC, specifically the National Union of Mining Workers (NUM), a union founded five years ago by his countryman Cyril Ramaphosa and federated in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), where he assumed functions directives in the training apparatus.
After Mandela’s release and rehabilitation of the ANC in February of 1990 by the government of Frederik de Klerk , embarked on the liquidation consensus of apartheid and the establishment in South Africa’s multiracial democracy, the union was responsible for establishing the legal structures of the party in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging area (PWV, then part of the Transvaal province and converted into the Gauteng province in the 1994 land reform ) where he served as the first regional president of the ANC. After his release, he served as Secretary General of the ANC in 1997, occupying the position of vice-president from 2007 . The 22 of September of 2008 he was elected to replace Thabo Mbeki as interim president of South Africa .
ANC representative in South African trade unionism
He was born in Alexandra, a ghetto on the outskirts of Johannesburg, as the eldest of six children (other sources report that he is the youngest of 13 siblings) had by a proletarian couple who were trying to raise their numerous offspring; the father worked for the Anglo-American mining company, while the mother worked as a laundress and textile worker . When the boy was ten, the family was forced by the white racist government to settle in Soweto , the large suburb black to the south of Johannesburg . There, Motlanthe attended primary school at a school run by Anglican missionaries and secondary school at theOrlando High School . At this tender age the future leader was greatly influenced by the Anglican Church , in whose offices he participated as an altar boy.
However, a political awareness soon prevailed in him that pushed him into the military in the resistance movement of the black majority against the segregationist apartheid regime and the dictatorship of the National Party (NP), whose main champion was the African National Congress (ANC), banned since 1960 and that had its main leaders in prison, in confinement or in exile. In 1967 the young man was arrested for carrying out illegal political activities and spent 11 months in prison. He subsequently found a job as a liquor inspector in the Johannesburg municipal administration, although he continued to develop underground activism in the ranks of the ANC.
In the early seventies he joined the arm armed of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), created by Nelson Mandela in December of 1961 , shortly before his final imprisonment, in the note the ineffectiveness of the methods not violent in the struggle for national liberation. Motlanthe was part of a unit of Umkhonto we Sizwe initially dedicated to military recruitment and training, but later specialized in sabotage operations and urban terrorism, as well as the escape and infiltration of comrades through Swaziland .
In April 1976 , two months before the popular uprising in Soweto, drowned in blood by Prime Minister Balthazar Vorster’s security forces , Motlanthe was captured and confined to a building in Johannesburg, awaiting trial for violation of the Law. Anti-terrorist. After a year, in March 1977 , the court found him guilty of three counts and sentenced him to ten years in prison, which he began serving in the Robben Island Maximum Security Prison, located on a small island in the sea off Cape Town . Some of the party’s top leaders were already imprisoned there, including Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, sentenced to life imprisonment in the famous trial ofRivonia , in 1964 .
The new inmate became an intellectual disciple of Govan Mbeki, who raised the flag of Marxism in the ANC, despite not being his official doctrine, and was also a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP), a closely allied force. to the congressmen to the point of sharing a lot of militancy. Motlanthe became one of these double militants, although he channeled the bulk of his political activism into the ANC.
Motlanthe fully served her sentence. In April of 1987 he received his freedom and he decided to join the trade union movement linked to the ANC, namely the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), he founded five years ago by his countryman Cyril Ramaphosa and federated in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) guild , where he assumed directive functions in the training apparatus. After Mandela’s release and rehabilitation of the ANC in February of 1990 by the government of Frederik de Klerk, embarked on the consensual liquidation of apartheid and the establishment in South Africa of multiracial democracy, the trade unionist was in charge of establishing the party’s legal structures in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV, then part of the Transvaal province and converted in the province of Gauteng in the territorial reform of 1994 ), where he served as the first regional president of the ANC.
In September of 1991 he ceased in this political role and refocused on union activity. Credited as a congressman from strong socialist convictions and filomarxistas in January of 1992 he reached the General Secretariat of the NUM replacing Ramaphosa, ANC appointed by the head of delegation in negotiations with the government of de Klerk. In the next five years, during which the transition was completed to multi – racial democracy with the celebration ( April of 1994 ) general elections widely won by the ANC, the formation of a government of national unity headed by Mandela ( May1994) and the adoption of a new Constitution (May 1996 ), Motlanthe negotiated from the union front a new collective agreement for workers in the mining sector, affected by industrial reconversion.
Likewise, he was among the main architects in 1995 of the Mining Workers Investment Company (MIC), an entity in charge of financing the economic and social development projects prepared by the NUM in mutual agreement with the Government and which became one of the mainstays of the so-called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), an ambitious government program focused on the redistribution of wealth and the provision of opportunities to marginalized social sectors in the apartheid era, which was the case for millions of black proletarians.
Promotion in the hierarchy of the party and interim president of the Republic
The prestige achieved in the middle and lower ranks of the ANC for their habitual criticisms of the government’s economic liberalism and corruption catapulted Motlanthe to the eminently political position of secretary general of the party at the 50th National Conference, held in Mafikeng from December 16 to 20 from 1997 . It was the appointment in which the vice president of the Republic and heir indicated by Mandela, Thabo Mbeki (Govan’s son), succeeded the previous one as executive president of the governing formation and saw his candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic official in the June elections from 1999. Motlanthe took over from Ramaphosa, who had been defeated by Mbeki in the internal struggle for Mandela’s succession and who already had one foot in private business, where he was carving out a lucrative career as a capitalist investor. Months later, the former union member withdrew from the Central Committee of the SACP and ceased his affiliation with this formation.
Under President Mbeki, ripped the 16 of June 1999 Motlanthe, reelected secretary general of the party at the 51st National Conference in December of 2002 , he paid his image left to defending the validity of the sovietizante principle of democratic centralism processes discussion and decision-making in the party, and by demanding the reform of certain points of the Constitution – legally possible after the elections of April 14 , 2004, when the ANC reached a two-thirds majority, but rejected by Mbeki- in order to remove from strategic organs of the State in the judiciary, the security forces and the monetary authority representatives of the old white elites to whom the transfer of power in political institutions had not affected.
His lack of harmony with Mbeki came to the fore in 2005 , when he came out to defend Jacob Zuma, the popular and populist vice president of the Republic, vice president of the party’s National Executive Committee and clear favorite for the succession in 2009 , whom Mbeki dismissed in first of the positions on June 14 after being compromised by the scandal of the collection of commissions in arms purchases made for the Armed Forces, which had just cost his financial adviser a harsh prison sentence. Shortly after, Zuma himself was indicted and indicted for corruption. In addition, in February of 2006He was brought to trial on a rape charge, of which he was acquitted after three months; in September of the same year, Zuma also escaped, although only provisionally, from the corruption charges when the process in this case was annulled.
Throughout this commotion, which opened unprecedented fractures in the ANC and noisily exposed the prolonged antagonism between the sectors most heeled to the left, supported by popular organizations and rank-and-file militancy, and the technocratic and reformist liberal wing, well represented in the Government, Motlanthe gave credibility to the denunciations, voiced vehemently by COSATU, the Youth League and the ANC socialist cadres, that Zuma was nothing more than the victim of a conspiracy hatched by his enemies in the congress , who would pretend to abort his aspiration to the Presidency of the Republic.
In particular, he maintained the authenticity of some mysterious emails and chat excerpts , revealed to the public opinion and allegedly extracted from private correspondence between the Vice President of the Republic, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka , the magnate Saki Macozoma , the opposition leader Tony Leonand other personalities, from which the existence of a plot to ruin the political careers of Zuma and himself emerged. Unlike Motlanthe, Mbeki maintained that such messages were false, and his environment raised the suspicion, angrily rejected by the National Executive Committee, that the authors of the messages should be sought precisely in the circles of the two leaders placed in the spotlight for its alleged debunkers.
However, the secretary general, with his always calm manner and his conciliatory manner, critical more than anything of dissent and fights and oblivious to personal disqualifications, did not arouse enmities in the Mbeki camp , while his reputation grew among the unconditional supporters of Zuma, to the point of being proposed by the union front as a compromise candidate, acceptable to all, for the replacement of Mbeki in 2009. The interested party denied this possibility outright, clarifying that he had no presidential ambitions.
At the 52nd ANC National Conference, held in Polokwane, Limpopo, from December 16 to 20, 2007 , Motlanthe joined Zuma as a candidate for the position of vice president of the National Executive Committee, disengaged by him to fight his final battle with Mbeki for the Executive Presidency of the party, which the head of state was reluctant to leave despite the expiration of his government mandate in 2009. Mbeki’s defeat was complete, as he lost in his private fight with Zuma and his vice-presidential candidate, the minister Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (at the time, the ex-wife of the new party chief), suffered the same fate against Motlanthe. He was succeeded in the General Secretariat by Gwede Mantashe, his successor also at the head of the NUM in January1998 and concurrently national president of the SACP.
The 6 of maypole of 2008 Motlanthe became deputy of the National Assembly, where he covered the seat vacated by a deceased conmilitona in November, Zipporah Noisey Nawa . Mbeki was then appointed by the new ANC leadership, dominated by Zuma supporters, to a government post, where he debuted as a minister without portfolio on July 18.. The South African press then pointed out that Motlanthe, at ease in his organizing and structuring work in the party apparatus, had to be persuaded by Zuma’s environment to enter the National Executive within a strategy clearly aimed at cutting the margin of Mbeki’s maneuver and prepare the transition that was to culminate with the presidential inauguration of Zuma in mid-2009, an automatic consequence of the ANC’s sure victory in the parliamentary elections, for which there was still no set date.
Mbeki’s exit was precipitated in September 2008, culminating his confrontation with Zuma. On the 20th of that month, the National Executive Committee of the ANC, invoking the exoneration eight days ago by a Pietermaritzburg judge of Zuma from the corruption charges, considering that his incrimination presented indications of being politically instigated, approved a resolution in which ” revoked “the president in office. Hours later, Mbeki expressed his intention to comply with his party’s request and on the following day announced his resignation in a televised speech to the nation, an occasion that he took the opportunity to deny that he or anyone from his Cabinet had intervened so that the prosecution could prosecute Zuma.
On September 23The National Assembly decided that Mbeki’s resignation would be effective on the 25th. That same day, in solidarity with his boss, several members of the Cabinet resigned, including Vice President Mlambo-Ngcuka, Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, and that of Finance, Trevor Manuel, who immediately afterwards rectified so as not to scare the financial markets. At midnight from 24 to 25 Mbeki effectively ceased and its functions were assumed for a few hours by Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, the Minister of Communications. It was a bridging exercise, until the parliamentary inauguration in the morning of the presidential incumbent with a mandate until the end of the five-year period, in mid-2009, depending on whether the legislative elections were held in April, May or June. With certainty, such was going to be Motlanthe,
The 25 of September of 2008 the number two of the congresismo was elected by secret ballot by the National Assembly third president of South Africa since the end of apartheid with 269 votes against the 50 obtained by the other candidate, purely formal, Joe Seremane, one of the leaders of the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party. There were 41 abstentions. More striking was that a score of ANC deputies did not support the investiture of their own party’s candidate, a new sign of a serious internal division that was undoubtedly going to top the list of concerns for the new president in the months ahead.
Motlanthe was sworn in on the same day the 25th and with it the members of the new Cabinet, which did not undergo major changes and could be described as continuity. Manuel, the architect of economic stability based on liberal reformism, was confirmed in Finance, as was Dlamini-Zuma, the previous rival for the party’s Vice Presidency, in Foreign Affairs and Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula in Interior. Baleka Mbete and Charles Nqakula replaced Mlambo-Ngcuka and Lekota in Vice Presidency and in Defense, respectively.
In his first words, Motlanthe, in a calculated exercise of restraint, paid a highly praiseworthy tribute to Mbeki for his “contributions to the construction of this nation” and justified the ministerial renewal of Manuel – whose head the radical sectors of the party had been demanding- because “in a turbulent global economy , we must maintain the policies that have kept South Africa smooth and that have ensured sustained growth.”
These conciliatory gestures did not serve, however, to appease the deep discontent of those loyal to Mbeki, whose main spokesman, Lekota – succeeded in the National Presidency by Baleka Mbete and defeated by Gwede Mantashe in the bid for the General Secretariat at the 52nd National Conference – On October 8, he stirred up the specter of an imminent schism (“we are presenting the divorce papers,” he said), which would be the second in the almost 100 years of life of the historic movement and party, founded in 1912, after the creation of the Pan African Congress (PAC) by Robert Sobukwe in 1959.
In his explosive statements, Lekota warned that his faction would be forced to officially break with the ANC and become an opposition party unless the current congressional leadership immediately canceled its “dictatorial” line and the manifestations of “tribalism”, in reference to the profusion of bellicose chants and pro-Zulu slogans (the ethnic group of Zuma and Motlanthe, while Mbeki is a Xhosa, like Mandela) uttered by the followers of the executive president of the party throughout his judicial saga, in the 52nd National Conference and lately at the investiture of Motlanthe.
Personal life
A hermetic man in everything related to his private life within a reserved personality, and affectionately nicknamed Mkhulu (grandfather, in Zulu, despite not being in his sixties, a condition he acquired in July 2009), it is known that Motlanthe is married and He is the father of three children, and he is a huge jazz fan .
