"Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength.
Mastering yourself is true power."

- Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese strategist.

The pull and push political factors that basically played on and paralysed Kgalema Motlanthe, the former ANC Deputy President and (still) current SA Deputy President, in the run up to the ANC elective conference and bitter leadership contest in Mangaung in December last year, and left him 'agonising' for so long, are not easy to pin down nor explain. But they speak to the fundamental nature, challenge and the very essence of politics as we have come to know it.

They are the stuff politics is all about. They are its heart and soul.

Motlanthe's unprecedented prevarication and long-held inscrutability regarding his political ambition and intention, or lack thereof, for the top ANC leadership position, are themselves worthy of special political investigation.

The primary question to pose in this regard is: What is the nature of these political pull and push factors that played so much havoc on Kgalema Motlanthe's mind last year?

In his recent Op-Ed article reviewing the political meaning of the newly-released film on Abraham Lincoln, David Brooks, the prominent New York Times columnist, wrote that "the challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning."

He further stated that "politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for public good", and that "...politics is the best place to develop highest virtues."

In this articulation of 'the noble', 'high vision' and 'highest virtues' of politics, by David Brooks, we gain the first best theoretical insight for why politics, and leadership in politics, remain so attractive and compelling to Kgalema Motlanthe, and why he did not and could not just walk away from the temptation to challenge ANC President Jacob Zuma for the top position.

It is arguably Motlanthe's Address to the SACP Gala Dinner on 14 July 2012 that best sets out his view about "politics as the best place to develop high vision...and highest virtues", especially in the context of ANC-SACP partnership. Once again Motlanthe used this SACP Gala Address to nail his colours to the mast regarding his belief that the former ANC and SACP legendary leader, Moses Kotane, represents for him the best personification of the best political and public service there is in SA politics. Moses Kotane's selfless service to the ANC, SACP and SA is a recurrent theme Motlanthe returned to in many of his major speeches, including at the launch of the Moses Kotane Foundation in early December last year.

Motlanthe's high regard for politics as the best place to develop 'a high vision' is also embodied in his one and only State of the Nation Address (SONA) to the SA Parliament as short-lived SA President on 06 February 2009, especially when he stated that:

"...I have chosen...to emphasise the point that South Africa does not suffer the poverty of visions. Our challenge is to translate these visions into programmes and projects for effective implementation."

In this instance Motlanthe visualised politics as the best collective human endeavour for the betterment of the world and the human condition, and embraced it as the best instrument and vocation for the mobilisation of all that is best and uplifting in all of us. It is the type of politics whose unblinking gaze is fixed, like a laser beam, at the stars above, and does not wallow in pettiness and self-pity. It is politics as a lofty and unsurpassed human liberator of all that is shackled.

On the other extreme end of the continuum of politics, we find the angry, pompous but very cogent pronouncements of the brilliant and influential German philosopher, Nietzsche, on politics and leadership, also relevant to our understanding of the complex predicament and interplay of pull-push factors Motlanthe 'agonised' over as he pondered whether to challenge ANC President Jacob Zuma or not in Mangaung.

In his important treatise, Nochlass, Nietzsche wrote that:

"...the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own soul and shroud it in a royal cloak, (in the end they still become the slaves of the followers, their fame) etc."

With these words, Nietzsche offers a trenchant exposé of why politics repels and disgusts so many of us as a  self-serving and conceited sport, totally lacking in 'high vision' or 'highest virtues'. This Nietzschean formulation of the imperative of political power may also explain Motlanthe's great reluctance throughout 2012 to promptly answer to the clarion call to "get out of your white suit and into overalls, and dirty your hands", boots and all, as the current ANCYL deputy president, Ronald Lamola, put it to Motlanthe at a recent ANCYL-organised election rally in the Eastern Cape.

If that side of politics were not repellent enough for him, here is what Nietzsche stated about politics which would definitely appal and disaffect a gentle, ethical and thoughtful soul like Motlanthe:

"My idea", wrote Nietzsche, "is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extent its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continuously encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and end by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they conspire together for power."

In these Nietzschean words about 'bodies' that come together as "unions", or ANC factions and slates if you like, to "conspire for power", is the best philosophical enunciation against the debilitating ANC practice of 'leadership by arrangement' on the part of  powerful ANC backroom and provincial power-brokers and 'lobbyists', which Motlanthe, to his eternal credit, has consistently condemned and denounced since his ANC Secretary General Organisational Report to the ANC elective conference in Polokwane in 2007. This is despite the fact that his own rise to ANC deputy president position in Polokwane in 2007 is imprinted all over it with the birth-marks of this destructive practice of 'ANC slates.'

This Nietzschean conception of politics and hard power as "will to power", is now so massively popular and fashionable, in practice at least, among most of the post-Polokwane ANC branch delegates, is the dark and utterly sordid side of politics that would have disgusted and mortified Motlanthe to no end, one imagines. It is the side of politics that makes the general public to daily proclaim with resignation that "politics is dirty"!

Motlanthe uncharacteristically poured out his soul regarding his born-again and latter-day revulsion and contempt for this Nietzschean conception of politics during his Address at the South African Student Congress's Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture at the Walter Sisulu Ubiversity in 2011.

As if, strikingly, unconsciously echoing Nietzsche's words that "...the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness...(In the end they still become the slaves of the followers, their fame)", Motlanthe stated the following about the 'ANC leadership slates' during his Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture:

"It is clear", he stated, "that some within our organisation are beset by perceptions of vulnerability, exclusion and powerlessness in the face of fissures and concentrations of power in certain pockets."

He realized with blinding clarity that Nietzsche's 'bodies' or 'unions' were conspiring for ANC power, in a naked demonstration of 'will to power.' He also realised that leaders "still remain the slave of followers'. Motlanthe bemoaned many times the insidious culture of ANC backroom power-brokers calling on those they put in power to remind them of who put them there, and that in such circumstances 'you can't lead.' Or as Nietzsche put it, 'they become the slave of followers, of fame.'

Motlanthe must have been shattered to think that some among his leadership comrades think nothing of being 'the slave of followers' and 'the slave of fame,' (Nietzsche), and that they are completely devoid of 'the highest virtues' and 'high vision' (David Brooks).

Motlanthe further went on to bitterly lament, in his Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture, that "among some of these challenges are issues such as social distance between the governors and the governed, bureaucratic elitism, arrogance of power, careerism, venality and corruption, moral and ideological degeneration among rank and file and the use of state institutions to fight inner-party battles."

More than even Nietzsche, the philosopher Hobbes would have smiled at this Motlanthe candour about what ails his own party - the untreated and spreading cancer gnawing away at the very ethical and moral fabric of the ruling ANC.

And so in each and every one of us with a sufficiently reasonable conscience, and a well developed political consciousness, David Brook's conception of 'the noble', "the highest virtues' and 'high vision' of politics, coupled with Brooks' own understanding of 'the low cunning of politics', on the one hand, and Nietzsche's outrageous conception of politics as "the will to power", where the powerful and strong-willed perpetually strive, ineluctably, "to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because life simply is will to power" (Beyond Good and Evil, S.259), and "the desire to expand one's power", on the other hand, would shock and immobilize the highly refined political instincts and ambition of a sensible and politically sensitive Motlanthe.

It is the less salubrious nature of politics which we in SA generally refer to as 'wheeling and dealing' of local politics. It is the side of politics that corrupts, disfigures and impoverishes the human soul. It is politics existing in the gutter, in the shadows, in the dark corners and operating under a cloak of skulduggery.

Yet the high vision and low cunning of politics are merely two sides of the same political coin, as David Brooks makes clear. Without one side, the other cannot be. The challenge for a seasoned politician like Motlanthe is to manage and harmonise this ever-present dialectal contradiction and tension within politics.

To simplify matters, it seems last year Motlanthe desired to advance "the high vision' and 'the noble' in politics, without wanting to dirty and compromise his squeaky clean reputation with the inevitable 'low cunning' and touching 'unions which conspire for power' in politics.

Motlanthe's ANC opponents, on the other hand,  went straight for 'the low cunning' and 'will to power' in politics, even its 'inward weakness', as attested to by the SA Constitutional Court judgment on the ANC Free State Parys provincial conference, without caring for a moment whether their incredible and destructive demonstration in practice of Nietzsche's conception of "will to power" and 'low cunning' could not be productively and seamlessly married with "morality", "highest virtues" and "high vision" of politics, especially in a young democracy such as ours.

As a result Motlanthe entered the Mangaung leadership boxing ring after tying his own hand at his back, blind-folding his left eye, hobbling his right foot and asking his fans not to shout their support for him. The more sensitive viewers turned off their TV set, instead of watching the Mangaung battering that ensued.

Throughout much of 2012, Motlanthe conveyed a mixed and tactically inept message of a top political dog reluctantly fighting in the corner of ANC underdogs, or 'power outsiders.' What he decidedly lacked though was a public demonstration of fire in his belly, a burning passion for his top leadership ambition, an infectious belief in his own capacity to emerge victorious, a fiery rhetoric and a scowling facial countenance. He appeared to be just putting a dispirited show at challenging the incumbent for the ANC top spot, just going through the motions, with all his calm and unruffled outer demeanour. He resolutely rebuffed any attempt to make him the public rallying point and lightning rod for anti-Zuma revolt and disaffection within the ANC.

Motlanthe was not just a reluctant candidate for a top political position in the ANC, but often looked like a candidate deliberately cultivating only a reluctant, dispirited and confused support base for his confused and unmarketed cause. He seemed to go out of his way to actively discourage his potential supporters from liking and embracing the notion that he could actually win in Mangaung, or from exuberantly displaying and pledging  their public support and affection for him - their reluctant candidate. Sometimes in the middle of last year, he was hugely pained and clearly embarrassed to find a Polokwane stadium packed to capacity with his over-enthused ANC supporters, who not only wore T-shirts embossed with his face and boisterously, if also joyously, singing ANC revolutionary songs in his praise. He could hardly contain his ire and irritation at such a huge public display for his presidential candidacy. He went on to tell off and show his middle finger to his assembled supporters for daring to show such emotional affection for him, claiming their open display of their support and love for him was alien to the culture and traditions of the ANC, and amounted to divisive and factionalist tendency. His supporters were totally stunned and deflated. They began to feel quite guilty about showing their support and loyalty to the only politician who, they believed, could carry their dreams for leadership change within the ANC, but who was quick to remonstrate with them publicly for not containing themselves and for not concealing their support for and faith in him. It was a extraordinary, totally bizarre political conduct by a reluctant candidate for the highest party political position in the land.

This unheard of political stunt on the part of Motlanthe may just be a first in the history of electioneering within a democratic ruling party. Other commentators go as far as saying the real campaign Motlanthe led with vigour, aplomb and great conviction, was the campaign against himself and those who desired to campaign for him to lead the ANC in Mangaung. In the end, he brilliantly succeeded in this objective, although at the end he too looked truly stunned by his amazing electoral defeat against himself and his ever dwindling bedraggled band of supporters in Mangaung.

It is no surprise therefore that in an interview with the Sowetan of 28 November 2012, Epainette Mbeki, the mother of former President Thabo Mbeki, described Motlanthe thus:

"I don't have confidence in Kgalema", she said. "He is a difficult character to understand. One does not know what he stands for."

[Many would later be befuddled by Motlanthe accepting nomination to the positions of ANC President and Deputy President, as well as a position on the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC), all at once. This was proof positive to many of Motlanthe's supporters that, at the end, he himself did not know what he wanted, or, as Epainette Mbeki put it, 'it is hard to know what he stands for'. By any measure in life, that is very poor leadership indeed]

This brutal, no-holds-barred, political and personal assessment of Motlanthe by Epainette Mbeki, who for many decades was herself an illustrious and iconic leader of both the ANC and SACP, must have skewered and savaged Motlanthe's legendary inner poise and calm, especially if it is recalled that Mac Maharaj, Jacob Zuma's current presidential spokesman, in his biography by Padraig O'Malley, revealed that upon his release from Robben Island by apartheid rulers in 1989, Govan Mbeki, the husband of Epainette and the father of former President Thabo Mbeki, settled in the city of Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, where he proceeded to establish a powerful ANC power-base around himself, in competition with both Robben Island (at the time rumours were flying that Nelson Mandela was selling out in his prison talks with apartheid rulers) and Lusaka, as represented by the exiled ANC President OR Tambo. Maharaj states that he discovered, whilst operating underground in SA around that time, and to his consternation, that Motlanthe was one of the senior internal ANC leaders who fell under the spell of, and swallowed - line, hook and bait - the dictates of the newly-released Govan Mbeki-cultivated ANC power-base in Port Elizabeth.

Yet today the 96 year old wife of the same Govan Mbeki, the struggle stalwart Motlanthe once risked his all to serve so well calls Motlanthe "dangerous" and "a difficult character to understand", and instead prefers the ANC leadership of Zuma over that which Motlanthe might have offered following Mangaung. It must have been a bitter political pill for Motlanthe to swallow, in his usual studied silence, against this background.

But there once was a Kgalema Motlanthe who was just too keen to put on a public display the fire in the belly, and his burning passion for his convictions and for political underdogs. A Motlanthe who spoke his mind forthrightly, without fear and without mincing his words.

It was Motlanthe that no doubt Epainette Mbeki and practically all of Motlanthe's ANC supporters in the run up to Mangaung, would have loved to see emerge.

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director of the Center 0f Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA). This is the first of two articles.

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