Kgalema Motlanthe

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Lore & Background

Motlanthe was born on 19 July 1949 to a family in Alexandra, a township outside Johannesburg. He attended Pholosho Primary School until his family was forcibly removed to Meadowlands, Soweto. In 1964, the Anglican church awarded him a bursary to study in Swaziland, but the Bantu Affairs Department denied him permission to leave the country, so he attended Orlando High School in Soweto. After Matric, he got a job supervising township liquor stores for the Johannesburg City Council. During the 1970s, he was recruited into the underground of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). His MK unit was initially concerned with recruitment but later instructed to form a sabotage unit and help smuggle MK cadres across borders. In April 1976, he was arrested and detained at John Vorster Square, found guilty under the Terrorism Act for having been trained to commit sabotage, for having received explosives for that purpose, and for promoting the ANC. He was imprisoned on Robben Island for almost ten years, between August 1977 and April 1987. ANC stalwart Andrew Mlangeni later said Motlanthe was instrumental in welcoming and providing political education to young prisoners who arrived after the 1976 Soweto uprising. Five years after his release, Motlanthe described the period as 'enriching': 'we were a community of people who ranged from the totally illiterate to people who could very easily have been professors at universities... To me those years gave meaning to life.' In June 1987, he became an education officer at the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), then led by Cyril Ramaphosa. He joined weeks before the largest strike in NUM history. In January 1992, with Ramaphosa's endorsement, Motlanthe was elected by the NUM central committee to replace him as acting general secretary.

Reader's Guide

At the ANC's 50th National Conference in December 1997, Motlanthe was elected unopposed as ANC secretary general, reportedly with the support of senior ANC leaders including Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela. According to senior NUM official Frans Baleni, Mandela advocated for Motlanthe by telling a story of a young man looking for a wife who found one right next door—saying 'the secretary general the ANC needed was right here.' When the announcement was made, he was carried to the stage on the shoulders of supporters, and 'it took another 15 minutes for him to reach the stage, struggle songs filling the air.' Re-elected unopposed at the ANC's 51st National Conference, he served as secretary general for ten years, the entirety of Thabo Mbeki's tenure as ANC president. ANC membership increased from under 386,000 in 1997 to more than 620,000 in 2007. He was associated with implementing the early phases of the ANC's cadre deployment and Black Economic Empowerment policies. He was elected ANC deputy president on a slate aligned to Zuma at the 2007 Polokwane conference. In mid-2008, he was sworn in as a Member of Parliament and as Mbeki's second Minister in the Presidency—his first job in government. Only weeks later, on 25 September 2008, Parliament elected him national president after Mbeki resigned at the ANC's request. Motlanthe was widely understood to be a compromise candidate leading a caretaker administration until the 2009 national election. During his seven and a half months as president, he appeared to prioritise stability and continuity, but on his first day in office, he replaced Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang with Barbara Hogan, effecting a break with Mbeki's HIV/AIDS policy, which had been criticised as ineffective and driven by denialism. He also dismissed National Director of Public Prosecutions Vusi Pikoli and assented to legislation disbanding the Scorpions anti-corruption unit. Zuma was elected president in May 2009, and Motlanthe was appointed his deputy. In December 2012, under pressure from Zuma's opponents, he contested the ANC presidential elections at the Mangaung conference. Zuma won in a landslide. Motlanthe declined to seek re-election to the ANC National Executive Committee and had already declined a nomination for re-election as ANC deputy president. He resigned from government and from Parliament in May 2014, at the end of his term as national deputy president. Variously and at various times perceived as an ally of Mbeki, Zuma, and Cyril Ramaphosa, Motlanthe always kept a low public and political profile. He is seen as holding broad respect in the ANC and is frequently characterised as one of its preeminent left-leaning intellectuals.

Did You Know?

• Motlanthe was named for his maternal grandfather, Kgalema Madingoane, who was a councillor in Benoni and later a community leader in Daveyton.
• As a child, he was an altar boy and considered becoming a priest, influenced by the Anglican Community of the Resurrection sect.
• He first met Jacob Zuma while both were underground MK operatives in the 1970s.
• His father, Louis Mathakoe Motlanthe, worked as a cleaner at St John's College and later for Anglo American; his mother, Masefako Sophia Madingoane, was a domestic worker and then a machinist.
• ANC membership increased from under 386,000 in 1997 to more than 620,000 in 2007 during his tenure as secretary general.