Monday 29th September. Cape Town.

Another week. Another Sunday night. Another president. This week we were addressed on TV again by the new president of South Africa – Kgalema Motlanthe. Very reconciliatory, very dignified. He invoked the Freedom Charter – that invaluable working document for a new South Africa written some 53 years ago, for a non-racial, non-sexist, non-discriminatory, prosperous country for all, shared by all.

He was not chosen by the people of South Africa, but by the working committee of the African National Congress. So how do we keep him? How can we say we want him to be the next president of the country, and not Jacob Zuma?

The former president, Mbeki, only had a few months of his second term to go before he was pushed out – but the ANC and its supporting organizations from the trade unions (COSATU), the South African Communist Party (it took me a moment to think who they were representing) and the youth wing of the ANC – had had enough.

It’s been quite dramatic, a script for a film from Africa that hadn’t been written before. Leaders in Africa are quite often the ones who cause most of the problems, rather than solving them. So to have two leaders step down (Mandela and Mbeki) in an African country, in less than 15 years of democracy, is something to write home (or blog) about.

The new President comes from a trade union background. He was general-secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), taking over from Cyril Ramaphosa – who chosen by Mandela as his successor, but was out-politicked by Mbeki for the job. Ramaphosa had a controlling hand in Mbeki’s resignation. The trade unions have had a big impact on South African politics – in particular, the NUM.

What is very interesting is what is taking place within the ‘Party’. The ANC is Africa’s oldest political party and after 96 years is facing some major challenges. They keep talking about unity, consensus, and comrades being ‘deployed’. But this seemed to be revenge. Moeletsi Mbeki (brother, and mostly critical commentator of ex-president Mbeki) says it is the end of the ANC as it was known before.

And the good news – the previous Minister of Health, Manto Tshabala-Msimang, during whose term over 2 million South African died from AIDS related diseases of which hundreds of thousands were preventable, is no longer the Minister of Health! People danced in the streets.

Ok. Enough politics for now. Back to films. And real life. Hmm.

Photo from IOL