TOM EATON | Viva, Motlanthe, viva! Finally an ANC member champions humanity

I don’t know where former president Kgalema Motlanthe sits in the current hierarchy of the ANC, but after this week’s extraordinary condemnation of Vladimir Putin and Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, I suspect he’s lost access to the executive lounge and is headed for the mail room.

It’s rare to see political heresy in action and, to be fair, not many people saw it on Wednesday either: when I watched Motlanthe’s online discussion with author Ann Bernstein for the Centre for Development and Enterprise, the YouTube counter revealed it had been viewed just 66 times.

Which is pity because Motlanthe was impressive, reminding us in his quiet, thoughtful way that not everyone in the ANC is a puffed-up meathead or a gutless hypocrite willing to sell their soul for a few million bucks from a Russian oligarch. (In case you’ve forgotten, Google “Viktor Vekselberg” and “United Manganese of Kalahari”.)

Certainly, it’s a very long time since I’ve heard anyone in the ruling party speak so publicly and dispassionately about how gatvol we’ve all become. Explaining to Bernstein that the party was aware of its failings and had a right to try to renew itself, he added: “But South Africans should not be bound by that timetable.”

It was a supremely elegant admission that the ANC isn’t going to change any time soon and a surprisingly human acknowledgment that we’ve all simply had enough.

Motlanthe was impressive, reminding us in his quiet, thoughtful way that not everyone in the ANC is a puffed-up meathead or a gutless hypocrite willing to sell their soul for a few million bucks from a Russian oligarch.

But gentle nonconformism quickly became heresy and then outright blasphemy in the final minutes of the hour-long discussion, when Bernstein asked Motlanthe his views on Ukraine.

At first it seemed he would hedge. Wars, he said, “don’t start on the day the first shots are fired. There’s always a build-up.”

Indeed, anyone watching the interview from Luthuli House would have been confident Motlanthe was about to launch into some Kremlin talking points about Nato encroachment and Nazis in Ukraine.

But then all hell broke loose, at least as much as it can break loose over a mild-mannered Zoom call, as Motlanthe quietly denounced Putin as a liar who had acted unilaterally against the interests of his country.

“Putin did not give the full account to the duma, which is the parliament,” he said, adding that Putin “went beyond” the goals he’d outlined for Russia’s lawmakers. “The Russians themselves sit with a war they did not approve of.

“That’s something that should be condemned.”

And why had Putin done this? The answer, said Motlanthe, was found in “the arrogance of the powerful”.

“The powerful always think they can overrun their adversaries,” he said, “and no doubt Putin thought he could overrun Ukraine.”

Motlanthe’s words are unlikely to change anything, except, as I said, his seating arrangements at Luthuli House and perhaps the number of Christmas cards he gets from the United Manganese of Kalahari mine.

But as a citizen of SA and the world, who is nauseated by my government’s refusal to call out colonial aggression in Ukraine, I feel surprisingly grateful he said those words and chose his humanity over his party.