The Mark Gevisser Profile
One Free State, one Lekota?
`One Free State!” yells Councillor Bazooka Ma-baso, working the crowd for Comrade Terror.
“One Lekota!” the overflowing classroomful of Mangaung residents yells back, on cue. The chant, first heard in Welkom a week or so ago, is moving like tumbleweed across the Free State’s plains as the leadership battle grows between Terror Lekota and the “big five” — the African National Congress’s senior officials in the province.
“One premier!” “One Lekota!”
There’s something moving in the fervour, one could even say anger, with which it is uttered — and something a little alarming in the cultishness. The event, meant to be a support rally for the premier masquerading as the launch of a new ANC branch, actually has the feeling of a revival meeting, an outpouring of emotion that says more about those doing the praising than the person being praised. It is as if these people — workers, drunks, housewives; comrades festooned, almost nostalgically, with paraphernalia collected during the glorious days of April 1994; at least two imitations of Winnie’s inauguration hat; children outside with noses pressed against the windows; Sunday bests and old woollen jerseys side by side – — need to reclaim not just their hero but their dreams (which he carries) from the defilements of these past few weeks.
And there, behind the bunting, a face unfolds, out of beleaguered anxiety, into its legendary smile. The front tooth might have been fixed, there might be the extra weight of power around the jowls, but there’s still something unquestionably folksy about this face; the open countenance of the liberation movement.
Terror takes the mike and he’s home. For 40 minutes he keeps the crowd with him, as he skilfully weaves, into a standard stump about the neccessity of structures, an impassioned call for them to become involved in the movement so that they can know for themselves the truth and not be deceived. He will not forsake them, he says, in his rasping, compelling seSotho, and they cheer. This is the Terror of the 1980s: they don’t come with more charisma.
Back in the Mercedes. Back to reality. The cellphone rings. He is late for a meeting. The face folds in upon itself again; the nose wrinkles, the brow creases. He is under immense stress: distracted, impulsive, exhausted, inexplicably intense one moment and switched off the next. Terror Lekota will deny it to his last breath but, only months after the devastation of his eldest daughter’s suspected suicide, he is fighting for his political life.
We zoom up to Free State House, his grand residence on the hill. Back in “the big room”, as his family calls it — still filled with the Boere-kitsch of yore (antelope heads; copper engravings; a poor copy, in beige and baby blue, of the ho`kultuur one would find at ex-Groote Schuur and Libertas) — loyalists from the “allied structures” await him. The unions, the civics, the women’s movements: together they will strategise.
The allegations against him are that he reshuffled his Cabinet without the requisite consultation; that he is using a corruption charge to dispose of a political foe; that he has ignored an agreement made with both the national ANC structures and the provincial general council of the party to turn the corruption allegations over to an independent inquiry. These allegations, which concern malpractice in the provincial Department of Economic Affairs and Tourism, have resulted in the demotion of Lekota’s arch-rival, Ace Magashule, from the Cabinet portfolio of Economic Affairs and Tourism to that of Public Transport, and in the demotion of Tate Makgoe from Finance to Environment and Tourism.
The result of the row is that ANC leaders in the region, which failed to elect Lekota as provincial chair in 1994, have now dropped him from their highest organ in the province, the Provincial Working Committee. They seem determined to get rid of him. Lekota disputes the allegations against him strenuously. He has handed over the evidence of corruption to the attorney general and auditor general, he says: what is that if not an independent inquiry?
Paging through his diary, he demonstrates the fact that he did indeed “consult” extensively before exercising his prerogative to reshuffle. He had done this, he claims, because he believed Magashule was “better suited” to the on-the-ground work of Public Transport, and because “I had begun to hear rumours about misconduct, and I felt that if people were querying a certain individual, it’s better to move that person, to calm things down”.
As the evidence of misconduct grew, “it began to take shape in my mind that the whole thing has nothing to do with the fact that I do or don’t consult. It has to do with the fact that, with the changes in Cabinet I effected, these things [the imputed corruption] were going to be picked up.” The attack on him, he believes, is thus “a smokescreen, a cover-up thing”.
Under Steve Tshwete, the ANC’s National Working Committee has been called in to mediate, but has not clearly backed Lekota. “The problem,” says one senior ANC official who was a colleague of Lekota’s in the United Democratic Front, “is that Terror has confused the Constitution with convention. According to the Constitution, he has acted correctly. But according to convention, he’s off. He didn’t bring the important players along with him.” For this reason, some of Lekota’s greatest allies are finding it difficult to support him against his foes.
Magashule agrees “the Constitution specifies that the premier has the power to appoint his Cabinet. But we’re putting it in the context of ANC culture and tradition, and we’re saying there’s no individual above an organisation. You don’t want to build a cult of one individual. It is the ANC who rules this province, as a collective. Not one man.” It is, of course, impossible to govern by collective — and so this dispute puts the Free State’s troubles at the heart of one of the ANC’s central dilemmas now that it is in government: accountability versus efficiency.
Lekota’s record in the province has been good. With the limited resources available to a provincial leader, he has governed well: it is hard to find a count against him as an administrator. No one — perhaps not even Nelson Mandela himself — bears more responsibility, in this country, for popularising non-racialism: after his switch to the ANC in jail in the late 1970s — a switch which led many of his generation of black consciousness leaders to follow — Lekota made it his mission, upon release in 1982, to advocate non-racialism. This is a legacy he has maintained by effecting, brilliantly, a reconciliatory process within the Free State. He has utterly disarmed the right wing in that province with his bluff, gravelly charm — even as he has torn down their statue of Verwoerd from outside the provincial headquarters.
But he clearly has not managed to bring his own party leadership along with him, even if he does have popular support. The problem goes back to his appointment, as candidate for premier, before the 1994 elections. Magashule had been expecting the premiership and had come first on both northern and southern Free State ballots: Lekota, in fact, only came 35th. But the ANC decided that Magashule wasn’t senior enough, and that the Free State needed some buttressing: rather than selecting Lekota for the national Cabinet, an arena many feel he would have excelled in, the movement deployed him to govern his home province — a region he had not really lived in since his childhood, and in which he had no substantial political base.
Rather than trying to smooth this difficult situation into a workable compromise, Lekota fell right into already existing tensions between the northern Goldfields (from which Magashule and his supporters come) and the south, around Bloemfontein. “Terror is the straightest man I know,” says someone who worked with him in the UDF, “he’s not sly. He’s not an operator. He has a list of things to get through and he does it. The niceties of politics were always left to others.”
He was brilliant, for example, as Popo Molefe’s deputy on the ANC election commission in 1994 — but he put many people’s backs up in the process: “He has a tendency to be dictatorial,” one insider says. “So, too, does Mandela. But Mandela gets away with it.” Perhaps this explains why, as Free State premier, he has been a good administrator even as he has had a difficult time politically.
In his long-standing partnership with Molefe, he has always been the aggressive mass-mobiliser to Molefe’s quieter intellectualism. He thinks on his feet and says what he thinks. Using precisely those skills, he is now mobilising the province to his side. He never attacks his opponents directly in his speeches, but before he talks, a Bazooka Mabaso will shout: “Phantsi, iOpportunisti, Phantsi!” And everyone will know exactly who he means.
Terror Lekota is en route, from Bloemfontein, to address a mass meeting in the north. On the way, he makes an unscheduled stop at the farm on which he was born, in the Senekal district. We visit the one- roomed farm school both he and his mother attended. It is built of solid sandstone blocks; 1919 is inscribed on the lintel. Inside, it is dank, derelict and littered, but still in use. “Barnes and Dugard!” he cries, picking up the very grammar textbook he probably read out of in the early 1950s. He is distressed that the floor has collapsed: next week, when he comes here on his birthday to sleep over and to address the school, he will bring concrete with him and lay a new floor.
Then on to the grave of his grandfather — a peasant who lived for 56 uninterrupted years on the farm and who raised Lekota. The old man died last year; Lekota built him a fancy tombstone, and buried him on the ancestral plot.
Now he notices that there is cowdung all over the graves, and that cattle have been scratching against the tombstones. Local farmworkers tell him the man who rents the property, a right-winger, moved the beasts from a neighbouring farm on to the plot specifically to trample the Lekota grave. He screws his face up, but makes no mention of the desecration until I ask about it in the car.
“My grandfather,” he replies, “once told me that you must learn to refuse to complain, because one day, if you make a habit of it, you may walk past the house of your neighbour, and if his dog barks at you, you may go down on all fours and bark back. When people come out to investigate the din, they’ll not be able to tell the difference between dog and human being … The only way to deal with this is to build a proper fence so that it can’t happen again, and to go on with life as if nothing happened.” He pauses. “And to buy the farm so my ancestors can live in peace.”
In the timeless silence of a deadened winter highveld, a convoy of cars, led by a Mercedes carrying the most important man in this land, bumps by on a rutted road. For the first time in 36 hours, I sense a calmness in Terror Lekota, despite — or perhaps because of — what he has just seen. In the midst of his crisis, it has been difficult for him to talk; perhaps this visit to his roots has been his way of telling me about himself without having to. The past — golden, crisp and dry in the afternoon light — animates and excites him; perhaps even recharges him for the battles that await him once we’re back on the cellphone network. This is where he comes from. This is why he fights.