SA does not mourn an ordinary man today. It mourns a conscience; Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota - whose fearsome nickname was earned on the football fields of the Free State. Over the years, the name came to describe something far more significant: the terrifying moral clarity with which Lekota spoke truth to power, regardless of cost. He was one of the last of a rare and vanishing breed.
He is gone now. But the questions he asked, the warnings he sounded and the lonely stands he took did not die with him. Lekota was born in Kroonstad in the Free State, and grew up under apartheid - not as an abstraction, but as a daily, grinding, humiliating reality. And from that reality, he forged not bitterness, but purpose.
Lekota matriculated at St Francis College in Mariannhill, Durban, in 1969 and enrolled to study social science at the University of the North (now University of Limpopo). By 1972, his activism within the South African Students Organisation (Saso) and the SRC had made him a marked man. He was expelled.
Rather than retreat, he advanced. In 1974, a regime terrified of young Black men who could think and organise had him imprisoned for activities it characterised as “conspiring to endanger law and order”. He was released in 1982 — but not diminished. Not quieted. Not broken.
Lekota channelled his energies into the United Democratic Front (UDF), the internal resistance movement that gave political expression to millions who had no other voice. Then came the Delmas Treason Trial of 1985 − one of the most consequential political trials of the resistance era. Lekota was among 22 activists prosecuted by a regime desperate to silence the UDF leadership.
Eleven were convicted. Lekota received a sentence of 12 years. His initial conviction was later reviewed on appeal, and he was released in 1989 - but not before spending years as a political prisoner, a distinction he shared with the greatest of his generation.
When the new SA was born in April 1994, Lekota moved seamlessly from resistance to governance. He was appointed the first premier of the Free State. In 1997, Lekota was elected national chairperson of the ANC. He served in that role until 2007. He also served as defence minister in the Thabo Mbeki administration.
What Mbeki recognised − and put on record in a remarkable letter to Jacob Zuma - was that when Lekota raised concerns about the direction of the ANC in the years after Polokwane, he was not, as his critics contemptuously alleged, engaged in the promotion of a personality cult or driven by factional loyalty.
He was raising genuine political concerns, rooted in a lifetime of sacrifice and principled engagement, about the moral and institutional decay he could see consuming the liberation movement from within.
In September 2008, Mbeki resigned as president under pressure from the ANC’s newly configured leadership. Lekota, as a matter of honour, resigned from the cabinet days later. And then, in October of that year, alongside Mbhazima Shilowa and others who could no longer reconcile themselves to what the ANC had become, he did something that required both extraordinary courage and extraordinary pain: he left. The Congress of the People (COPE) was born from that rupture.
But politics, like football, has an unforgiving relationship with potential. COPE was consumed by internal divisions - the very factional pathologies that Lekota had left the ANC to escape appeared, with bitter irony, within his new home.
Support collapsed: 0.67% in 2014, 0.27% in 2019. The project had failed. Not because Lekota’s diagnosis was wrong, but because the institutional scaffolding required to sustain an alternative was never properly built, and the leadership capable of building it never fully materialised.
He was a man shaped by Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement who nonetheless opposed Malema’s EFF on land expropriation - not out of inconsistency, but out of a considered political philosophy that could not be reduced to any faction’s slogan.
The 2024 national and provincial elections told a story that would have confirmed Lekota’s worst fears: the ANC, for the first time since 1994, failed to secure a majority of the national vote. It now governs through a coalition arrangement. The 2026 local government elections loom as an existential test. The party that brought liberation to SA faces the possibility of becoming a minority force in the very cities that were once its heartland.
It was foreseen by Lekota and those who, in their different ways, tried to sound the alarm before the freight train hit.
The correct tribute to Lekota is not flowers at a graveside or words in a parliament chamber. It is a return to the ideals for which he and his generation sacrificed - to constitutional democracy, to accountable governance, to the rule of law.
Lekota is survived by his wife Cynthia and six children.
Rest in power, Terror Lekota. The Struggle continues.
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