Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe (Sotho: [ˈkxɑ.le.mɑ mʊ.ˈtɬʼɑ.n.tʰɛ]; born 19 July 1949) is a South African politician who served as the president of South Africa from 25 September 2008 to 9 May 2009, following the resignation of Thabo Mbeki. Thereafter, he was deputy president under Jacob Zuma from 9 May 2009 to 26 May 2014.
Raised in Soweto in the former Transvaal after his family was forcibly removed from Alexandra, Motlanthe was recruited into uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), after he finished high school. Between 1977 and 1987, he was imprisoned on Robben Island under the Terrorism Act for his anti-apartheid activism. Upon his release, he joined the influential National Union of Mineworkers, where he was general secretary between 1992 and early 1998. After the end of apartheid, he ascended from the trade union movement to the national leadership of the ruling ANC, serving as ANC secretary general from late 1997 to late 2007. He was elected ANC deputy president, on a slate aligned to Zuma, by the ANC's 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 and to be 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 with the policies of the previous administration. However, 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 made controversial changes at the National Prosecuting Authority, dismissing the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Vusi Pikoli, and assenting to legislation which disbanded the Scorpions, an elite 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 party's Mangaung conference. Zuma, the incumbent, 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. Having thus vacated the party leadership, 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 each of the other living presidents – Mbeki, Zuma, and his trade union colleague Cyril Ramaphosa – Motlanthe was reputed to be "a highly skilled political operator" by the time he became president. However, he has 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 intellectual[s]".
Motlanthe was born on 19 July 1949 to a family in Alexandra, a township outside Johannesburg in the former Transvaal (now Gauteng). He is named for his maternal grandfather, Kgalema Madingoane, who was a councillor in Benoni and later a community leader in the newly established township of Daveyton. His father, Louis Mathakoe Motlanthe (d. 1989), worked as a cleaner at St John's College and later for Anglo American, and his mother, Masefako Sophia Madingoane (d. 2014), was a domestic worker and then a machinist in a clothing factory. He has two younger brothers, Tlatlane Ernest and Lekota Sydney.
He attended Pholosho Primary School, an Anglican missionary school in Alexandra, 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 of the apartheid government denied him permission to leave the country. He therefore attended Orlando High School in Soweto, and he played soccer as a teenager.
He has said that the Anglican church was an important influence on his early development, especially the Community of the Resurrection sect to which Archbishop Trevor Huddleston belonged and which, during his childhood, was visible for its community work in the townships. As a child, he was an altar boy and considered becoming a priest. In later years, he was influenced by Black Consciousness.
After Matric (which in South Africa means completing final year of high school), Motlanthe got a job, which he held until his arrest, supervising township liquor stores in the commercial unit of the Johannesburg City Council.
During this period, in the 1970s, he was recruited into the underground of uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), which had been banned in South Africa since 1960. His MK unit was initially concerned with recruitment but was later instructed to form a sabotage unit and to help smuggle MK cadres in and out of the country's borders. It was during this period that he first met Jacob Zuma, also an underground MK operative.
In April 1976, Motlanthe was arrested and detained for several months at John Vorster Square police station. He was found guilty under the Terrorism Act on charges relating to his MK activities – specifically, for having been trained to commit sabotage, for having received explosives for that purpose, and for promoting the ANC – and was sentenced to prison.
Motlanthe was imprisoned on Robben Island for almost ten years, between August 1977 and April 1987. ANC stalwart Andrew Mlangeni, who was on Robben Island with Motlanthe, later said that he was instrumental in welcoming and providing political education to young prisoners, who arrived on the island in large numbers in the decade after the 1976 Soweto uprising.
Five years after his release, Motlanthe spoke about the solidarity forged in prison, and 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. We shared basically everything, every problem even of a personal nature we discussed with others and a solution would be found. The years out there were the most productive years in one's life, we were able to read, we read all the material that came our way, took an interest in the lives of people even in the remotest corners of this world. To me those years gave meaning to life.
In June 1987, shortly after his release from prison, Motlanthe became an education officer at the influential National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which was then led by Cyril Ramaphosa. He had been familiar with the mining industry since his childhood – his father and both his brothers had worked for mining giant Anglo American – and his mother had been involved in the trade union movement before her retirement in the 1980s. At the NUM, Motlanthe furthered his interest, born on Robben Island, in political education. He joined the NUM weeks before the largest strike in its history, and Ramaphosa later said that he had "joined us at just the right time".
While at the NUM, he remained a member of the ANC, and also of the South African Communist Party (SACP). He was chairperson of the ANC's PWV (now Gauteng) region for a brief period, between early 1990, when the ANC was unbanned, and September 1991, when he stepped down to concentrate on his NUM work. Shortly afterwards, Ramaphosa left the NUM to become secretary general of the ANC. In January 1992, with Ramaphosa's endorsement, Motlanthe was elected by the NUM central committee to replace him as acting general secretary.
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 and SACP official Frans Baleni, Mandela (affectionately known as Madiba) advocated for Motlanthe's appointment as follows: