PERHAPS it's due to all the attention he has been receiving lately, but Julius Malema has now suggested that the Economic Freedom Fighters would take up arms against the ruling party should the government be silly enough to respond to them with force.
As he put it, in a pre-recorded interview aired on SAfm, "We can't rule out the possibility of an armed struggle if the state is going to meet peaceful protest with violence. We would not do anything which seeks to compromise the 1994 breakthrough and it all depends on how the state responds to the radical demands of our people."
The EFF commander-in-chief had reportedly added that he hoped the ANC would not be tempted to adopt "apartheid tactics" when faced with what he termed "serious pressure".
Thing is - at least as far as we're concerned, here at the Mahogany Ridge - the ruling party long ago yielded to the temptation of behaving like the old Nationalist government. But, as far as actual state violence against them was concerned, the EFF had no need to fear anything just yet.
Malema apparently made his comments in reference to the celebrated disruption of President Jacob Zuma's question-and-answer session in the National Assembly in August, when the Teletubbies chanted that Zuma pay back some of the R246m spent on the Nkandla security upgrades.
The EFF MPs had refused to leave the chamber when ordered to do so by the speaker, Baleka "Goldfields" Mbete, and members of the riot squad were summonsed to the parliamentary precinct. There was no need, Malema told SAfm, for this "military response" from the state.
Given that the riot squad did not intervene in the chaos of that afternoon and did little other than appear a bit grumpy at having their time wasted, I'd say "military response" was stretching it a bit, but then the commander was rather skilled at that.
"In the Parliament," Malema continued, "the freedom of speech and expression is unlimited. It is absolute and you need to live with that."
That is perhaps how it should be. But thanks to Mbete's efforts - and Luthuli House's screeching insistence that Zuma and other senior government members be legally protected from insult in the National Assembly - there was now greater freedom of expression outside Parliament than within.
It was easier, for example, for a person in the street to allege that Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC's deputy president, had blood on his hands as a result of his involvement in events surrounding the Marikana massacre, than a sitting MP.
In this regard, there was some relief on Monday, at least among EFF supporters, that the commnader-in-chief's corruption trial was postponed by the Polokwane High Court to August next year.
There was the usual bluster afterwards about conspiracies - the sort of thing that Zuma moaned about vis-a-vis his own spot of corruption bother - but the upshot here was that Malema now had an extra ten months in which to make a nuisance of himself in Parliament.
His brief court appearance did not however go down well with one former supporter. Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula - a bosom tjommie back in the day when Malema was ANC Youth League president and would kill for Zuma - launched a bitter if misguided Twitter attack on his old friend.
It started when he noticed that Malema was wearing a Louis Vuitton belt, an unusually high-end designer item for a people's champion. Mbalula couldn't help himself, and was soon prodding away at his phone with podgy thumbs: "Consistency must be portrayed by leaders, dont have double personalities ‘poor' yet you're drowning in Branded clothes like Malema."
It was ugly, syntactically poor, and ignored the fact that Malema's taste in fashion was fostered by the ruling party, but it made sense. Sort of. One nil to Mbalula.
Thumbalula shot himself in the foot, though, with his next tweet. "He was in Court Today for Limpopo Corruption has he asked himself to PAY BACK THE LIMPOPO MONEY or he displayed hypocrisy?"
First, it implied that there was a case to be made about Zuma paying back the money. More importantly, it pointed out that Malema had at least appeared in court on corruption charges - and would do so again in August next year. The same, obviously, could not be said for Zuma. So, two-one to Malema, who had yet to fire a single shot in this so-called Twitter war.
When he did eventually respond with a tweet of his own, he did so with commendable brevity: "who paid for ur 40th birthday?"
Something perhaps for Parliament's next Q&A session?
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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