The harsh reality is that Julius Malema is basically unemployable. I can’t picture Malema digging furrows for a farmer, flinging refuse bags into a municipal garbage truck or parking cars. Such wages wouldn’t meet his material aspirations.
Malema was born poor with few prospects and access to only a rudimentary education. What menial employment there is that fits his qualifications is seen as yet another unfair humiliation – self-evident, historic injustice.
There aren’t many options for someone in that position: resign oneself to living as best one can on the family’s meager collective social grants; accept one’s lot and take a rotten job if one can find one; resort to crime. Or get into politics – increasingly a form of sheltered criminality.
And how like a gangster he has come to power. Fiona Forde’s An Inconvenient Youth documents the career of a bully who rises up through the ranks by intimidating and even physically assaulting his peers (pummeling one man’s face to a bloody mess). There is vote rigging, bought loyalties and nepotism from the start. Malema is violent, narcissistic, and yet – to use that matchless Afrikaans word – “kleinserig”.
His crowning glory as President of the ANC Youth League is to be wielded as a tool of what Cosatu calls “the predatory elite”.
Taken to court for singing a struggle song and banned from using it, Malema can at long last claim, faux naïf, a “struggle” credential. His political blade is sharpened by Winnie Mandela (who spent time in the same dog box after her speech about matches and tyres).
Now he faces numerous serious allegations of corruption, kickbacks and bribe taking. He stands accused of lining his own pockets through tender scams; in the process happily depriving the poorest of the poor of essential medicines. This is economic emancipation, Malema style.
In his political career, ideas do not feature. His appeal is based on a collection of crude opinions, slogans and choruses. Militancy is seen as a virtue; intolerance as strength.
Malema is defined by his rage, by the damage apartheid did to his psyche. He wants to eliminate “counter-revolutionaries”, which includes: judges who don’t rule his way, opposition parties, the ANC alliance partners, white farmers, the media, Western governments, international financial institutions, Ian Khama . . . the list is long. He has a deep antipathy to communists, who read more than he does.
He can only thinly articulate the few vague concepts he touts – state corporatism, land appropriation, nationalisation. He is adamant not to debate the issues. His mind is made up; he doesn’t want to be confused by facts.
What he is not short on is contradictions and political flip flops: presidents Mugabe, Mbeki and Zuma have all been hallowed one day, trashed the next. He’ll use any old appeal to rouse the mob, including religion.
The ANCYL have become an embarrassment. They need to rid themselves of the current leadership that sets a dismal moral and behavioural example to the parlous children of the country. Comparing themselves to the Youth League of 1949 is a gross insult to great men.
While the youth of Africa are overthrowing undemocratic governments across the continent, the avaricious ANCYL leadership, dressed in designer clothes, are hero-worshipping the likes of Kim Jong-Il and such latter day Herods as Mugabe and Gaddafi, while at the same time eroding one of the few established democracies on the continent – their own – South Africa.
As Malema’s African National Socialism gains sway over policy, the greater the capital flight – both financial and human. (On national radio, estate agents have started advertising permanent residency for South African passport holders who purchase property in Cypress.)
17 years into Zimbabwe’s democracy, the wheels came off the economy. We are passing that milestone now. The “ticking bomb”, the “powder keg”, the “pressure cooker” are well-used metaphors for the South African situation; only a witless fool would turn up the heat. Malema’s paymasters and President Zuma are foolhardy if they think they can keep control playing power games with forces of such volatility and destructive magnitude they threaten to tear the country apart.
A vicious cycle will develop. The more Malema and his ilk wreck economic recovery, the worse the conditions of the poor, the greater the unemployment, and perversely the greater their power. The more Malema polarizes the political landscape, the more he paralyzes debate, the more dysfunctional our politics, the harder it becomes to work together to solve the real problems, and once more the stronger is his hand. His strategy of turning South Africans against one another must be resisted.
Malema’s complaint is as irrefutable as it is nonsensical. Whites are wealthier, better off, still advancing their own. They are therefore to blame for the lack of progress. For National Socialism to mobilize, it must always have a scapegoat, a suspect minority.
Judge Colin Lamont’s decision that Malema’s chanted words constituted hate speech has been roundly criticized by advocates of free speech.
I wonder, would Justice Lamont have come to the same conclusion had he not been on the bench of an equality court specifically mandated to erase discrimination and rein in racial hatred stemming from the past?
Would Lamont have gone as far as he did, had not his courtroom been invaded by Malema’s gun-toting thugs? They made a barefaced attempt to intimidate him and through the television camera the whole country. Lamont had a firsthand taste of Malema’s belligerence and it unnerved him.
But ‘banning’ the song is wrong. The unfortunate result is that Malema is getting a big sympathy vote for all the wrong reasons and a national platform on which to strut his appeal.
There is only one way to counter the forces of Malema. The nation must not fall for his provocations as Afriforum has done.
We should follow the advice of child psychology 101 for dealing with playground bullies. Ignore the bully. Don’t be intimidated. Don't bully back; it satisfies them and it's dangerous. If none of that works, tell an adult – by which I mean, business, labour and government need to talk to one another and co-operate. It’s the only way we’ll ever resolve unemployment. Join hands. Don’t for one minute forget the poor, and we’ll prove Malema has the country all wrong.
– Brent Meersman is the author of Primary Coloured and Reports Before Daybreak.
