At the Mthatha Rhema Christian Centre this week former ANC chair Mosiuoa ”Terror” Lekota was a far cry from the bewildered man flailing to control the ANC’s national conference in Polokwane last year.
Lekota appeared increasingly comfortable in his role as rabble-rouser and self-appointed custodian of the ANC’s traditions, values and institutional memory — a persona that served ANC president Jacob Zuma effectively in the two years leading up to Polokwane.
Lekota alluded continually to ANC values learned at the feet of Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and Govan Mbeki on Robben Island, establishing personal struggle credentials and evoking memories that he suggests, are forgotten by the ANC’s current leadership.
He said the ANC colours and emblems used by heroes such as Oliver Tambo and Mandela are being tainted by people like youth league president Julius Malema.
In full flight, Lekota’s arms became animated, his lumpen presence occasionally theatrical: he stuck out his backside in choreographed imitation of Zuma’s Mshini wam‘ performances when tracing the historical use of struggle songs in the movement. He insisted that the present called for songs about ”peace, development and nation-building, not violence”.
A running theme during his address was Zuma’s silence on issues raised by himself and other concerned voices in the party: the spectre of tribalist mobilisation around the ANC president, the disrespectful utterances aimed at party elders and the ”purging” rather than ”promised unity of the ANC after Polokwane”.
And Zuma’s response to these concerns? ”Cwaka!” [nothing/silence] each time, Lekota told the crowd, wiping his mouth with his fingers in a delicate movement reminiscent of pantsula dancers, to the laughter of his audience. ”Comrades must be accepting of differences,” he said, painting, perhaps speciously, a picture of a party ”suddenly” wracked by intolerance of any deviation from the party line.
He bemoaned the ”violence, unruly behaviour” and ”jealousies” in party structures and meetings that have relegated the ANC to the level of a gang: ”Like the 28s, the ANC is becoming a numbers gang. And when we raise these issues we are told to keep quiet, in our own party!”
At one point, Lekota attempted a falsetto voice while imitating Malema’s constant bleating: ”Malema is like a child among adults, and when he is finally told to go play outside, he goes out and says all the things he has heard the adults say” — alluding to Malema’s role as the sanctioned pit-bull in the pro-Zuma arsenal.
As Lekota calls for a return to the old ANC, South Africa may just be witnessing the second coming of the old Terror Lekota.