Mosiuoa Lekota earned the nickname “Terror” not in politics but on the soccer field. Image:Picture: Itumeleng English/Independent Newspapers Some politicians play the game. Others rewrite the rules.Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekotarefused the game altogether, insisting through every storm on his own uncompromising terms.
He did it his way. You can almost hear Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” rising over South Africa’s turbulent political history: Robben Island’s limestone quarry, the exhilaration of 1994, the fracture of 2008, and the lonely benches of a shrinking opposition. Lekota’s life was not quiet.
It was defiant. Born on 13 August 1948 in Kroonstad in the Free State, the eldest of seven children in a working-class family, Lekota earned the nickname “Terror” not in politics but on the soccer field. He played with fierceness.
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He tackled without hesitation. The name stuck because the temperament did. At the University of the North in 1971, he joined the South African Students’ Organisation, absorbing Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy.
When organiser Abram Onkgopotse Tiro fled into exile, Lekota stepped forward. Leadership did not wait for him. He stepped into it.
In 1974, after attending celebrations of Mozambique’s independence, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act. The apartheid state called it treason. He called it solidarity.
On Robben Island he spent six years alongside Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. The prison yard was harsh, the labour relentless, and the future uncertain. But Robben Island did not break him.
It clarified him. There he embraced the ANC’s non-racial vision, convinced that freedom without equality would be hollow. Released in 1982, he plunged into the United Democratic Front and later stood trial in the Delmas Treason Trial.
Through the 1980s he organised, mobilised and endured. He was seasoned. Democracy in 1994 brought responsibility.
Lekota became the first premier of the Free State,later chairperson of the National Council of Provinces, ANC national chairperson, and, from 1999 to 2008, minister of defence under Thabo Mbeki. He was direct, sometimes abrasive. “We’re here to work.
So, let’s work.” It was not charm that defined him. It was urgent. He oversaw a military in transition, guided peacekeeping missions, and managed complex procurement decisions in a young democracy still finding its footing.
Then came the rupture. In 2008, after Jacob Zuma’s rise and Mbeki’s recall, Lekota saw an ANC he believed was drifting from principle toward populism and patronage. On 16 December 2008, alongside Mbhazima Shilowa, he launched the Congress of the People.
It was not just a new party. It was an act of rebellion against the movement that had shaped him.
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