Lekota remembered as a man of principle

President and leader of of the Congress of the People, Mosiuoa Lekota at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, 11 June 2020. Picture: Nigel Sibanda In the 1990s, when the recently unbanned ANC was negotiating the future of South Africa, one of its spokespeople, Mosiuoa Patrick “Terror” Lekota, was, for a politician, honest. And he would have no truck with pomposity.

So, he’s probably guffawing somewhere at the tributes paid to him after his death yesterday. He knew, more than most, what it was like to have feet of clay and would probably accept the criticisms of him. Those include that, when he was minister of defence, he did little to stop the slide of the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) into an underfunded and underequipped militia run by many unsuitable to hold rank.

That, though, was more the fault of the ANC itself, as the comrades got into high gear, looting. Corruption was among the reasons Lekota quit the ANC in 2008, accusing the organisation, then led by Jacob Zuma, of abandoning the organisation’s principles. He formed the ill-fated Congress of the People (Cope), with then Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa.

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Ill-fated because it failed to offer a credible alternative to the ANC. Lekota, though, was a reminder about the “internals versus exiles” division in the organisation. Some claimed the looting was begun by those who never left the country and, thus, never had the true spirit of struggle imbued in them.

The counter-argument was the exiles, deprived of much during their years in camps abroad, couldn’t wait to start “eating” when they got home. There’s probably a bit of truth in both versions.

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