In very large type, the front page of last week’s Mail & Guardian bore the headline, “Idiotocracy”, above pictures of ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema and AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche.
It was a striking headline. Even if the country can’t be said to be ruled by two idiots, as a literal reading would suggest, the description of the week’s politics as “a clash of stupidities” was apt.
It was the week when the news was dominated by these two men: one of them in death, the other through inflammatory statements and outrageous behaviour. With an eerie neatness, the two have come to represent the polar extremes of South African politics, linked together through the song Kill the Boer.
Terre’Blanche continues to make headlines because of increasingly salacious speculation about the circumstances of his death. But as a political story, it has largely run its course: a race war has failed to materialise, presumably to the disappointment of the British tabloid, Daily Star, which predicted it with such certainty.
Malema, on the other hand, continues to make very political headlines. President Jacob Zuma took the unusual step last weekend of calling a media conference to repudiate him, which must indicate that the ANC leadership has had enough of Malema’s behaviour.
It remains to be seen how far this will go. The recent history of the ANC shows that defiance of the leadership can have dire consequences: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Bantu Holomisa both bear such scars. So the current process may end with Malema being pushed into the political wilderness, but it could also end with him entrenched in the fold.
Much depends on his own behaviour, I would think, as well as the leadership’s assessment of his political weight. What kind of a constituency does he really represent? How much damage is he doing to the ANC’s support among the middle classes?
This brings me to the media, which also need to arrive at a sharper understanding of his political importance. Last week, in the wake of the incident in which he abused a BBC reporter, there was a discussion among journalists about whether he should simply be ignored. Fuelled by pique at his attacks on the media, the argument was that if we took away the megaphone, he would no longer be able to play the role of demagogue-in-chief.
The problem is that he is not simply a creature of the media. He does, after all, lead the ruling party’s youth wing. His leadership seems to be controversial, even within the league, but for the moment it remains in place. And the league is an important political force, having played an influential role in the development of the party on a number of occasions.
Ignoring him will not make him go away.
At the same time, the attention he’s getting is out of all proportion to his real importance. We have to ask ourselves whether his every self-important statement should be treated as having momentous political weight.
Reading the South African media at the moment, a foreigner might be forgiven for wondering who is in charge. Is it Zuma, apparently unable to show real leadership, or Malema, who has used people’s fears to build a reputation out of controversy?
Make no mistake, his reputation for radicalism has been skilfully and deliberately built. And the media’s fascination with controversy has certainly abetted the project. We should stop following Malema’s every word in the hope that he will again shock us with some outrageous, headline-grabbing statement.
But there are still important stories to be written about Malema. His unfolding relationship with the ANC leadership is important, as is the question of what kind of a constituency he actually represents.
At a deeper level, it’s worth considering why he has managed to get such a hold on the public imagination. It seems that there’s hardly a conversation that doesn’t at some point turn with horrified fascination to his latest antics.
Part of the reason must be that he encapsulates the worst fears of the middle classes, still largely white. All of a sudden, it feels as though we’re back in early 1994, with people hoarding candles and baked beans against the inevitable catastrophe. His Zimbabwe trip, ostensibly to learn how to implement nationalisation, was surely designed deliberately to press exactly these buttons.
The media need to take a deep breath and realise that Malema does not represent South African politics. If we allow him to continue dominating the headlines through cheap grandstanding, we allow more important debates to be crowded out.
Headlines such as last week’s run the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, fuelling the descent of politics into “a clash of stupidities”.
The Mail & Guardian‘s ombud provides an independent view of the paper’s journalism. If you have any complaints you would like addressed, you can contact me at [email protected]. You can also phone the paper on 011 250 7300 and leave a message