A two-sided enigma

What makes the controversial firebrand leader of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) Julius Malema fit to be singled out by President Jacob Zuma as a future leader of the ANC and the country? What is it that had Malema at Zuma’s side on important public platforms on three consecutive occasions this past week alone? Another side to the firebrand youth leader is starting to emerge.

Malema has in the past two years rapidly earned himself a reputation that ranges from being a joke, to a political buffoon, to a loudmouthed racist bigot, and more. Every time he opens his mouth, the media and his many detractors respond with incredulity.

He has made blatantly insensitive statements, some apparently heavily tinged with prejudice of various kinds.

But there seems to be another side to Malema, one that during the last week or so has come to the fore.

Malema is a self-made, shrewd, street-smart politician, speaking the language of the economically marginalised masses – a new kind of activist leader in a new kind of (socio-economic) liberation struggle.

In this role, he has also endeared and proven himself as a compassionate and committed champion of the poor, the downtrodden and a generation of young people with little prospects for the future.

Malema also showed political finesse when he became the one to turn the tide of emotional criticism of new Free State University rector Professor Jonathan Jansen into reconciliation and support.

It may not have been the smartest PR move by Zuma in an international context to have singled out Malema as a future ANC leader. The international Malema image is one of a venom-spitting buffoon of low intellect. But in the South African home politics context, it made a great deal of sense. Here, the other side of Malema is well known within the constituency that matters to both him and Zuma.

A part of Malema’s current rise to political stardom is perhaps due to the fact that Zuma and Malema are two of kind – shrewd street politicians who know how to turn on the charisma at the right moments. Both are a far cry from the aloof intellectual strategist that was former president, Thabo Mbeki.

Zuma’s anointment of Malema also lent instant credence to an increasing body of evidence showing Malema indeed to be a rising star in the ANC with influence out of all proportion to his actual position. The esteem in which he is held in the ANC is also evident from the fact that a special group of elder advisers was established in the party to help guide Malema and raise him politically for a future role.

But will he become a future ANC and South African president, as Zuma seems to believe?

Just because Zuma singled him out as a future president does not mean he will automatically get there. In the end Malema, like Mandela and Mbeki before, will still have to rise through the structures on the back of democratically cast votes. It is only there where Malema can be stopped.

But the ones who could have stopped Malema, the ones who could have exercised the necessary intellectual clout and influence, are absent from the emerging ANC of today.
They are the savvy smart young ones, the young intellectuals, the well connected rising young business people, the young professionals, the ones who increasingly choose not to join the Youth League or the ANC, even if they still support the party in principle and in elections.

It was left to a young lion such as Malema to emerge from his own background of poverty and lack of opportunities to seize the moment and take control of the streets and the township platforms.

That is his constituency, his power in the ANC. That is what Malema brings to the ANC, what he brought to Polokwane in December 2007 to help launch Zuma’s presidency.  
Malema is also media-savvy. He knows which buttons to press, which issues grab attention, and that negative publicity is much better than no publicity. As one analyst has put it: he knows how to leave a trail for the media to follow – a major asset for anyone with high political aspirations.

But if that is the Malema whose inciting speeches are filled with the thunder and rhetoric that makes investors and others nervous, there is another side to the man.
He was the first politician to arrive in Soweto last year to comfort victims after the devastating rains. He was one of the first to come to the defence of a grossly misused Castor Semenya, even if ill-informed and rather crudely.

It was also this same Malema who recently travelled to Standerton to broker peace in the Lekwa Municipality township of Sakhile together with Deputy Police Minister Fikile Mbalula and Mpumalanga Premier David Mabuza, after angry residents had engaged in a destructive service delivery protest.

This past weekend, Malema made a gift of 50 wheelchairs – half of them electronic and remote-controlled – to the Khwezi Lokusa Special School for the Disabled in the Eastern Cape.

The past week he also asked President Zuma to do more for education in South Africa, the way Robert Mugabe had done in Zimbabwe.

Perhaps few realise it after the way Mugabe has run his country down economically and politically, but he did play a critical role in raising education and teacher standards in Zimbabwe to among the best in Africa. Today, Zimbabwean teachers are sought after in many African countries, and many of them are being employed in South African schools and universities.

At the end of a week in which he played another masterful, praise-earning card: he held out an olive branch to former president Mbeki – praising him, calling him a hero of the ANC whose struggle credentials could never be erased and that his name was one with which the youth could associate for inspiration.