Are Mathews Phosa and Kgalema Motlanthe making a move to position themselves as presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2009 elections?

Their recent statements suggest that such a move might win significant support while undoing much of the damage that the reckless statements and campaigning of the Zuma camp of the ANC have done to South Africa's reputation.

Those wanting a political solution to the Zuma crisis need perhaps look no further than these two men.

This is a question that deserves examination following the statements of Mr Mathews Phosa and Mr Kgalema Motlanthe, the treasurer general and deputy president of the ANC respectively.

Recent statements by the two men appear to contradict those of their colleagues, the president of the ANC youth league, Mr Julius Malema, and the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), Mr Zwelinzima Vavi.

Apart from Mr Malema's election to the presidency of the ANC Youth League at a disorderly conference his primary achievement is his promise to kill for Mr Jacob Zuma, the ANC president. Subsequently, Mr Vavi, reiterated these comments, and said that ‘we are prepared to lay down our lives and shoot and kill'.

It would be enlightening to discover who the ‘we' is that Mr Vavi is referring to. Another worrying statement to come from Mr Malema was his call to ‘intensify the struggle to eliminate the remnants of counter-revolution, which include the DA and a loose coalition of those who want to use state power to block the ANC president's ascendancy to the highest office of the land.'

Mr Motlanthe is the only member of the ANC's top six to condemn the comments outright, by calling them ‘reckless'. The party's secretary general, Mr Gwede Mantashe, and the deputy secretary general, Ms Thandi Modise, defended the comments. Mr Mantashe did admit that Mr Malema's comments bordered on the reckless, he said ‘we refuse to condemn him' and defended him on the grounds of his youth.

Mr Motlanthe, on the other hand, said that Mr Malema's remarks were ‘intemperate and reckless for anyone to say any such thing, especially after the recent [xenophobic] killings'.

Mr Mantashe had also previously said that the country's judges were ‘counter-revolutionary'. When he was questioned regarding the statements, Mr Mantashe used the standard denial of ANC officials, claiming to have been ‘misquoted'.

Mr Motlanthe appears to be one of the few members of the ANC who seems to be capable of rising above the petty squabbles between the Zuma and Mbeki factions in the ANC, which are threatening to tear the party apart. Evidence of this was the appointment of Mr Ebrahim Rasool, the former premier of the Western Cape, as an adviser in his office.

This is to be applauded, as it has been speculated that Mr Rasool was only fired for being an Mbeki-ite. Mr Motlanthe's appointing of Mr Rasool is a shrewd move.

The ANC treasurer general, Mr Mathews Phosa, has also made some sensible comments in recent times. He was a popular premier of Mpumalanga, and his fate was the opposite of Mr Rasool's, being ousted for not being an Mbeki-ite.

His comments at a conference of the Freedom Front Plus recently will go a long way in allaying fears that the ANC is intellectually bankrupt. Mr Phosa said at the conference that it was important to get ‘white expertise back into the government administration' and that white skills and knowledge had been shed too quickly.

Mr Phosa also touched on the shelving on the Expropriation Bill, which he said had not been the ‘correct instrument to speed up the acquisition of land'.

Mr Phosa's comments on the loss of white expertise could appear to contradict Mr Malema's calls to ‘destroy the counter-revolutionaries'. It would surely be anathema for Mr Malema for former white employees of the state to be re-employed by the government, would they not be the vanguard of the very ‘counter-revolutionary forces' he has sworn to destroy?

Are Mr Motlanthe and Mr Phosa the bulwark in the current ANC standing against the forces of intolerance and violence? In that are they positioning themselves against Jacob Zuma to make a move of the presidency of the country in next year? Their recent statements suggest that such a move could be well received and garner significant support.

However, South Africans have seen their hopes dashed previously. A case in point is President Mbeki's mutation from a reconciler in the Mandela mould (examples of this are his meeting with prominent Afrikaners in Dakar in the 1980s and his ‘I am an African' speech) to a divisive African nationalist.

Let us hope that Mr Phosa and Mr Motlanthe can ensure that the ANC remains an organisation with the country's best interests at heart.

This article first appeared in SAIRR Today, the weekly online newsletter of the Institute of Race Relations, September 5 2008

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