Kgalema Motlanthe

Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe ( born July 19, 1949 in Johannesburg) is a South African politician and is currently Vice President under Jacob Zuma. He was on 25 September 2008 to 9 May 2009 President of the country.

Biography

The son of a washerwoman and an office boy was born in 1949. He grew up as the youngest of 13 children to. The family moved from Alexandra, a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, to Meadowlands, a suburb of Soweto, where his education began. In childhood, he worked as an altar boy in an Anglican church. His school days ended Motlanthe at the Orlando High School in Soweto. He then began working as a local supervisor of district sales offices in the Johannesburg City Council, which he held seven years. During this time he also acted as an active football player.

The youthful Motlanthe was at the time of the South African apartheid regime, a supporter of civil rights activist Steve Biko (1946-1977), founder of the Black Consciousness Movement. In 1976 he was imprisoned for his involvement in the banned organizations African National Congress ( ANC) and MK for eleven months.

A year after the uprising in Soweto, the 28- year-old was sentenced on the basis of the Terrorism Act to ten years imprisonment. This, he spent up to 1987 on the prison island Robben Iceland off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. During his detention, the anti-apartheid fighter Walter Sisulu Motlanthe attended and became his political teacher. Motlanthe, who completed a correspondence course at the University of South Africa, worked according to his detention as an officer and from 1992 as Secretary for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM ) and is active as a trade unionist in the Congress of South African Trade Unions ( Cosatu ), where in 1987 he was part of the trade union committee of the great strikes. At the same time, he pushed his political career in the ANC. The early 1990s was his responsibility to the ANC presidency in his home region. In 1997 he was elected to succeed the outgoing Secretary General Cyril Ramaphosa ANC. He held until 2007 this office.

In December 2007, Motlanthe decided the battle for the deputy party chair for himself. He was able to prevail against the Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini -Zuma, although he had flirted according to their own statements rather to an item on the organizing committee for the FIFA 2010 World Cup in their own country. At the request of the camp to the ANC chairman Jacob Zuma Motlanthe was appointed minister without portfolio in the cabinet of President Thabo Mbeki in July 2008. After an intra-party power struggle between Mbeki and Zuma, the President announced the end of September 2008 to his resignation and Motlanthe was surprisingly proposed by Zuma as interim president until the scheduled presidential elections in May 2009. Previously, the President of Parliament Baleka Mbete had been considered favorite for the post. Motlanthe himself had speculations about the political leaders in South Africa always rejected. After the official resignation of Mbeki and eleven ministers on 25 September 2008, he was sworn in on the same day as the new President of South Africa and was the third incumbent since the beginning of democracy in South Africa. The designated presidential candidate Zuma could not accept even the office at that time because he did not have an electoral mandate. After the parliamentary elections in April 2009, Motlanthe was under his successor as president Zuma new Vice President of South Africa. At the same time he was deputy chairman of the ANC. On 18 December 2012, he kicked against Zuma on for the post of ANC party leader, but received only about one quarter of the delegates' votes. On the same day Cyril Ramaphosa was elected ANC Deputy President Motlanthe instead.

Kgalema Motlanthe lives in Midrand, in Gauteng province. He is married and has two daughters and a son. Motlanthe, from family and friends affectionately known as Mkhuluwa (German: " the Elder " ) refers, was politically acted as a man of balance, the high organizational skills, but also talent is reputed as an arbitrator. At the same time, the popular politician was considered a potential competitor Jacob Zuma, who is sometimes seen by the white minority in the country and foreign investors as a populist. Motlanthe, who was involved in the past in a scandal over an oil - for-food program of the United Nations, had also spoken publicly about wanting to recruit more white members of the state administration.