Terror of old now terrorised: Cope slipping from Mosiuoa Lekota

Wednesday.

The president’s decision to appoint a national anti-corruption advisory council is no less surprising than his refusal to address parliament on the charges of corruption and money laundering laid against him by the former spy chief and former director general of the department of correctional services, Arthur Fraser.

After all, Cyril Ramaphosa’s stock approach to any “challenge” is to appoint a committee, while his strategy in response to the Phala Phala scandal has been to keep his mouth shut, instead of taking parliament, the ANC’s integrity commission and the rest of us into his confidence.

I don’t blame the president, at least on the Phala Phala bit.

I had a few run-ins with the law in my youth. I learned pretty quickly that the less said the better, even if it meant taking a beating until things reached the point where a lawyer could do the talking for you.

I’d be leery of giving the national anti-corruption advisory council too much leeway if I were Ramaphosa — maybe even make sure that it never really gets going.

After all, if Ramaphosa is not careful the whole advisory council diversion might blow up in his face, especially if it actually does its job and advises him to tell us the truth — or to step down.

Fist fight

I was shocked — and surprised — by the punch up that broke out at the Congress of the People (Cope) press conference, live and direct, on national television.

Not by the fact that members of the yellow party were willing to take a swing at one another — politics in South Africa is, after all, very much a contact sport — but by the fact that they were willing to do so in full view of the citizens of our fair republic — or at least those with television sets, cell phones and data.

One minute, Cope president Mosiuoa Lekota was trying to convince us — and himself — that he was still in charge of his two-seat party, the next its members were showing the world — and Lekota — that he very clearly is not.

Lekota looked more terrorised than Terror by what was unfolding — and unravelling — in front of him; as if he was suddenly hit by the realisation that he had stayed on the dancefloor for far too long.

It was a bit sad — Lekota was once a serious political force — but inevitable.

The party kicked off well with 30 parliamentary seats when it contested the 2009 national and provincial elections, born from the backlash over president Thabo Mbeki’s defeat at the ANC’s national conference in Polokwane in 2007.

But a decade later it had run out of ideas — and votes — with only Lekota and his current arch enemy, Cope deputy president Willie Madisha, left as the party’s representatives in parliament.

Word has it that Lekota and Madisha held their caucus meetings in the lift in parliament — no boardroom required — until they fell out.

Now each heads a rival congress national committee — the Cope version of an ANC national executive committee — and are suspending each other through the media — lawyers letters are sure to follow — with their supporters clearly happy to settle the rivalry in the street.

Sad but inevitable.

At one point Lekota was one of the then Inkatha president Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s worst tormentors, back when the Cope president was the ANC’s southern Natal convenor, appointed to re-launch the party in the province after it was unbanned in 1990.

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Lekota was a bit of a propaganda machine back in those days, and something of a force on the ground, particularly in Clermont, where he lived, and the neighbouring west Durban townships.

Lekota had survived Robben Island, the Delmas treason trial and countless spells in detention by the time he was appointed as convener and was pretty much fearless — a stocky, gap-toothed disciple of People’s Power who was more

than capable of living up to his nickname.

Lekota’s approach was to get in Buthelezi’s face — in the media and organisationally — to spoil his morning, on a daily basis. It’s a far cry from the bromance between the new ANC leadership in the province and Shenge that is unfolding before our eyes.

Lekota was everywhere. At one point he turned up at Wema Hostel with ibheshu and a straight of Bells in a black bin bag in the boot of his Corolla to launch an ANC branch deep in what was historically Inkatha territory.

Lekota pulled off the branch launch — along with countless others — in the process of convening the region, but ended up in the Free State, where he became premier.

Perhaps he should have quit then, when he was still Terror.

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