Stanley Uys wrote here last week that Julius Malema was a joke that ever-fewer people were laughing at. The ANC Youth League president (he's 28), was once seen as nothing but a buffoon. Now he was taking on an increasingly ominous aspect, said Uys (see article).
Doubtlessly, there is truth to Uys's assertion. When Malema's remarks first started to flow - sometimes they were illogical, sometimes they were outrageous, and often they were just plain stupid - people laughed. Even politics must have its clowns. It helps to make it a public entertainment.
Then the mood got muggier. The remarks became inflammatory and rather worrying - for example, his resurrection of the deep-frozen ANC policy of nationalising the mines.
At this stage the laughter starting drying up and people looked to Malema's ANC superiors for some sign that they were going to reign in their enfant terrible. The rebukes, once the ANC's grandees felt they had to say something, were muted and half-hearted. One had the uncomfortable feeling they were more in the nature of attempted explanations for Malema rather than admonitions. Moreover, their subject not only ignored them, he seemed to bask in the added attention.
Nothing was done. Malema stayed where he was, with no suggestion that his shoot-in-all-directions style was endangering his office within the ANC. Naturally, one understands that all political parties need their mavericks to act as lightning rods for their more radical supporters. It helps to keep them in the political kraal if someone in office is talking their talk. But in South Africa, where unrealisable expectations are the very essence of the threat to the government of the day, and where radical rhetoric scares off an already jumpy constituency on which much of the threadbare economy depends, toleration of an inflammatory provocateur seems more like outright foolishness.
That thought, though, never took hold, and the uncomfortable conclusion now is that Malema has slipped into the mainstream of South African politics.