Julius Malema (30) is president of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) – the youth arm of South Africa’s ruling party. Unfortunately, he behaves more like a wannabe gangsta than a future political leader.
It’s arguable though that he’s merely emulating the behavior that catapulted his mentor, Jacob Zuma, to the presidency. This explains why the country Mandela liberated is becoming just another dysfunctional African kleptocracy under Zuma’s rule. Which, alas, is dashing great expectations that it would become the Dark Continent’s beacon of democracy, economic development, and black empowerment.
Anyway, to get a sense of Malema’s foreboding and untenable popularity, just imagine Malik Zulu Shabazz, the racist and anti-Semitic leader of the New Black Panther Party, having such popular support in America that political analysts begin talking seriously about him mounting a challenge to President Barack Obama in Democratic Primaries next year….
Clearly this Shabazz-Obama scenario is utterly farfetched. Even so it captures the essence of what is now playing out between Malema and Zuma in South Africa. Indeed, political analysts there are speaking openly about Malema doing to President Zuma what Zuma did to then President Thabo Mbeki, namely, depose him as head of the ANC and then replace him as president.
It is noteworthy that Malema endeared (or ingratiated) himself to Zuma a few years ago by vowing that he and his young comrades would “kill for Zuma” if that’s what it takes for him to replace Mbeki as president. Not to mention the patronly pride Zuma must have felt when Malema defended him back then by claiming that the woman who famously accused Zuma of rape must have had a “nice time” because the morning after she “requested breakfast and taxi money”.
Yet all indications are that Zuma is becoming sufficiently wary of Malema’s mushrooming popularity and commensurate political ambition that he’s reportedly looking for ways to keep him in check. Ironically, Zuma may be able to ensnare Malema in the web of corruption that surrounds him just as Mbeki tried, to no avail, to do with that which surrounded Zuma.
In this case, Malema is being dogged by allegations that he uses his political connections to steer government contracts (e.g. for the privatization of government assets as well as tenders for public works) to select companies and then launders kickbacks from them through his Ratanang Family Trust. But his “secret” money-making schemes are so brazenly transparent that they have incited headlines like the following in local papers:
Two faced … Malema was happy to make millions from privatization while calling for nationalization.
(Mail & Guardian, August 7, 2011)
Malema founded the Trust in 2008 purportedly to fund orphanages, build schools and deliver welfare services to the poor. But this smacks of the typical ruse drug kingpins pull by dabbling in charity to give their criminal enterprise the veneer of legitimacy and respectability. Moreover, Malema makes a mockery of the purported mission of his Trust by living an ostentatious lifestyle that is grossly disproportionate to his legitimate income – complete with chauffeured limousines and armed bodyguards.
One wonders though if Malema has already become too intimidating and popular to keep in check: On the one hand, ANC leaders treat him like the schoolyard bully whom even the principal is afraid to discipline. On the other hand, poor blacks – who comprise the vast majority of the ANC’s base – treat him like a latter-day Robin Hood; never mind that they are too ignorant to appreciate that he’s not stealing from the rich to give to them, but from them to enrich himself.
In fact, white politicians and activists seem to be the only ones daring enough to call a spade a spade where Malema’s corrupt practices are concerned:
Today I will follow up on my previous letters written to the SA Revenue Service and the public protector requesting investigations into the personal finances of Mr Malema.
The alleged payments of R1.2m that have now come to light add greater urgency to our requests for a full investigation into who is financing his upmarket lifestyle and the building of his R16m Sandown home.
(Dianne Kohler Barnard, spokesperson for the opposition Democratic Alliance, News 24 Cape Town, August 15, 2011)
I suspect, however, that the political dynamics and demographics that enabled Zuma to overcome similar allegations of corruption will conspire twofold to enable Malema to overcome these. Not least because Zuma was being accused by fellow members of the ANC; whereas Malema is being accused by whites who he can easily dismiss (as he routinely does) by playing the race/colonialists card:
White kids are driving around his neighbourhood in expensive sports cars. But if a black kid becomes wealthy, people assume it is the result of corruption.
(Malema, BBC, February 27, 2010)
Alas, it hardly matters that, in far too many cases, the wealth blacks are amassing under ANC rule is in fact the result of political corruption and outright theft.
Yet, as venal a rabble-rouser as Malema clearly is, there’s no denying the pot-call-the-kettle-black spectre of complaints being filed against him by whites whose families enriched themselves for generations under the racist and genocidal rule of Apartheid.
And nothing indicates what little sympathy there is for whites among ANC leaders in this respect quite like their refusal to publicly rebuke Malema for leading tens of thousands of blacks in singing the song “Shoot the Boer” at ANC rallies. This refusal compelled AfriForum, a white civil rights group (with no appreciation of the irony, if not hypocrisy, inherent in its cause), to file a civil suit earlier this year in which it claimed that this song polarizes South Africans along racial lines and has incited blacks to kill white farmers.
The court agreed and banned the song. This was clearly the correct ruling. Because the lyrics are per se hate speech, which has no place in a democratic society.
It is important to note, however, that no link was ever established between the singing of this song and the killing of white farmers. Especially since it is far more likely that the few misguided blacks who took out their subsistence frustrations on white farmers in South Africa were incited to do so by the many misguided blacks who did the same in neighboring Zimbabwe … pursuant to official government policy.
To the relief and exultation of restive blacks, Mugabe announced sweeping land reforms in which his government would seize the ‘farms of white colonialists to give to landless peasants and the veterans of the war of liberation’. Unfortunately, like his independence blueprint for black empowerment, Mugabe’s land reforms have been an abject failure: Five years ago, there were 4000 white-owned farms in Zimbabwe; today, there are only 400 (mostly unproductive) farms left. Five years ago, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa; today, it is a basket case of starving people.
(Zimbabweans pray for liberation from their liberator – Robert Mugabe, The iPINIONS Journal, May 29, 2005)
But the point is that even blacks who think Malema is nothing but a national embarrassment could be forgiven their indignation at whites now complaining about a black song violating their civil rights when they expressed no concern at all about a white government that sanctioned institutional racism, economic hegemony and even murder against blacks.
Of course, such is Malema’s impudent and incorrigibly provocative nature that, after the court’s ruling, he promptly began leading ANC rallies in singing this same song only inserting the word “kiss” instead of “shoot”.
This man, despite displaying the disposition of a spoiled brat, seems to be on an inexorable and accelerated path to the South African presidency. The BBC titled a February 27, 2010 feature on him, “Julius Malema: Genius, clown or fat cat?” In fact, he is all three.
However, apropos of the allusion above, I fear Malema would do for South Africa what President Robert Mugabe has done for Zimbabwe. That is, of course, unless Zuma remains power hungry enough to “neutralize” him, which I’m betting is the case.
Stay tuned….
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