The ANC created Malema
The nation is waiting with bated breath to see the outcome of the ANC’s disciplinary hearing on the leadership of the youth league. The pertinent question is whether the ANC will discipline Julius Malema and his lieutenants if they are found guilty. The ANC leadership will be damned if doesn’t and damned if it does. This will be a litmus test for President Jacob Zuma.
There is a school of thought that Malema was charged for political reasons, not for bringing the party into disrepute with his pronouncement on “regime change” in Botswana. The move is seen as a power struggle ahead of the ANC’s Mangaung elective conference next year.
The ruling party should shoulder responsibility for what Malema has become. He was allowed to step on others’ toes with impunity. He was — and still is — at liberty to disrespect adults and call them names. He once called Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille a “racist girl”. He labelled ANC Cabinet minister Naledi Pandor’s accent “fake”. There are many others who have been victims of his loose tongue.
It is believed that Malema enjoys the protection of powerful ANC leaders in the national executive committee. If that is true, it explains why he gets away with murder. Now “Juju” has turned against the leadership he formerly fiercely supported. The youth league apparently wants Zuma replaced by his deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe, and it is also campaigning for Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula to succeed Gwede Mantashe as secretary general of the ANC.
The struggle for power in the ANC is raging. This is just history repeating itself. Will Zuma get a taste of his own medicine?
The outcome of the disciplinary hearing will have consequences for the ruling party. If the league’s leadership is found guilty and expelled, which is unlikely, there will be an internal revolt. If it is vindicated, Zuma’s leadership will be weakened even further.
The ruling party is reaping what it has sown. It has allowed the youth league to do as it pleases and that has come back to haunt it. It’s a little too late for the ANC to show the world who is in control. It should have nipped the cancer in the bud a long time ago. — Thabile Mange
In spite of denials and putting on a brave face when addressing last week’s hastily organised press conference, Malema and colleagues were betrayed by their sombre looks. Surely this is a realisation that the day of reckoning is imminent and it spells trouble for their political careers?
But who will feel sorry for a fool who hauls hot coals over his own head? All talk about them not being scared of a disciplinary hearing is rhetoric. Why spend thousands of rands on a night vigil if they are not shaken?
Malema claims he cares about the unity of the ANC, but his actions over the past three years tell a totally different story. Take, for example, his continual attacks on the ANC’s alliance partners and his divisive singling out of Mantashe for slander and disrespect.
The unity of the ANC has long been under attack from Malema, creating a gulf of suspicion between those who serve in government and those based at Luthuli House. The youth league even tried to cause division in the presidency by lobbying for Motlanthe to stand against Zuma.
Ironically, Malema’s previous disciplinary hearing had to do with his making a mockery of the ANC’s foreign policy in Zimbabwe. Malema and company fully deserve what is coming their way. — Ezekiel Mosia, Kroonstad
Hatred for Malema, combined with what Mantashe calls “Malemaphobia”, has led the media and other analysts to portray Malema as a deviant, uncultured in the traditions of the ANC, rebellious and disrespectful.
I have condemned the abrasiveness, rudeness and pseudo-radicalism of Malema and his lieutenants. I made calls to Zuma to tame him, but I also defended Malema when the media and right-wing organisations, such as the Democratic Alliance, AfriForum and Freedom Front, linked the death of Eugene Terre’Blanche to the “kill the boer” song.
The media has distorted the reasons for Malema’s being summoned before a disciplinary committee. It is not because he and his working committee are dividing the ANC and bringing it into disrepute. It’s because the mamba incubated by Zuma when he was under criminal investigation has now grown into a big, venomous snake that is beginning to bite its handlers. He insulted and ridiculed Thabo Mbeki, Zola Skweyiya, Naledi Pandor, Susan Shabangu and opposition leaders.
Malema is now an obstacle to Zuma’s second term. Zuma did not want a second term, but the Guptas, the MK Military Veterans’ Association, his family and others have not accumulated enough yet and they are scared that a new leadership might alienate them.
With Mbalula complaining about the influence of the Guptas, some have realised that the country and the ANC have been sold to the highest bidder. Zuma has used the issue of Malema to appease the white electorate and sober South Africans following his failure to act on the “Shicekagate” and “Sapsgate” scandals. The Malema issue diverts the media and the people from Zuma’s failures.
The youth league is correct to argue that it is Zuma’s behaviour between 2002 and 2009 that has brought the ANC into disrepute and divided the movement. Zapiro’s cartoon in the Mail & Guardian (August 26) was spot on when it showed Malema saying he learned his behaviour from his elders. This is a war over access to state power and resources. — Siyanda Mhlongo, KwaDukuza
The public must not be duped into believing that Malema is championing the plight of the poor and that he alone can take care of its interests. Instead, his unbecoming conduct is about taking care of his personal interests.
The youth league’s struggle is all about lobbying ANC candidates who will be useful to them at a later stage. It will enable league members to demand undue favour from the men and women they helped to top ANC positions.
Of course, they need relevant slogans such as the nationalisation of mines and land expropriation without compensation to resonate with the poor and unemployed. It is ironic that such slogans are being promoted by the same people who loot state coffers, buy expensive houses and cars and eat their dinners off naked young women — while the poor sleep on empty stomachs, often without a roof over their heads.
There is no battle for economic freedom being waged on behalf of the poor. The only struggle Malema is fighting is to guarantee that tenders find their way to him and his cronies. He and the league find creative means to continue the succession debate, to the detriment of the very organisation they claim to love so much. — Samson Kgomo, Burgersfort, Limpopo
The concept of easy privilege fails SA
Chris Roper perpetuates a very dangerous myth in his column (“Cheeses saves“, August 26) when he, like most other correspondents on the issue, justifies Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s call for a special reparation tax on white South Africans because of the privilege accorded them by apartheid.
The concept of privilege implies that a life of comfort may be gained at the expense of the work of others and without any work on the part of the privileged. The danger of this concept is that the downtrodden workers are given the false impression that all that is required for comfort and success is to trade places with the privileged. In the 17 years since the end of apartheid the failure of this concept is obvious.
What apartheid really did for white South Africans was to provide unfair access to opportunities, particularly education. Taking advantage of these opportunities involved a lot of hard work for the majority of white South Africans. The quality of the graduates produced is shown by how easily white South African graduates and technicians find work throughout the world. They are characterised by their capacity for work rather than sitting back and watching others.
The ANC government’s greatest betrayal of the people has been the denial of opportunity to the majority of South Africans previously deprived by apartheid. Only 7% of South African schools have libraries. How can the majority of South Africans take their rightful places in commerce and industry when they are denied the basic necessities of literacy and numeracy? How can talented sportsmen and women reach their full potential when schools have no sports fields and teachers do not coach?
Each white South African taxpayer supports up to seven fellow South Africans on welfare. Until those spending the money revise their priorities, having whites pay more will just achieve more of the same. — Eric Hodgson, Durban
What Mac meant
Let me spell out the subtext of Mac Maharaj’s letter, “M&G editorial is prejudicial” (August 26): South Africa is a country where all debates will be internal and will be conducted with total respect for logic, truth and respectability, qualities of which the ANC is, incontrovertibly, the sole guardian.
This (and other) debates will not be conducted in language (which is far too dangerous) but in a kind of fetishised polit-speak, characterised by the kind of tautological exactitude and innocuousness of symbolic logic. Only the ANC has the skill and acumen to use so pure and trustworthy a means of communication.
Spaces for discussion and debate must be closed down. The door must be closed (finally) on the public sphere. Some things are far too important to allow the press or ordinary citizens to have opinions on. — Damian Garside, Mafikeng
An embarrassing refusal
Pride fills me every time I take foreign visitors to our Constitutional Court. Nothing in South Africa spoke to me so clearly of the shining new democracy we became in 1994. Here was the bright fortress guarding our freedoms.
But I am sad for what has been done to that court recently.
The refusal by President Jacob Zuma to nominate Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke as chief justice of South Africa seems to me unworthy. Not only is there no obvious disqualifying circumstance, but there are very good reasons why he should hold the office.
Zuma’s decision to overlook him not once, but twice, is so blatantly political it is embarrassing. Moseneke dared to say that in his work the people of South Africa mattered more than the ANC or any political party. He is being punished for saying exactly what we should expect from every decent judge in the land. It seems Zuma cannot rise above his annoyance that Moseneke values judicial independence and the Constitution above party politics.
The Judicial Service Commission should be able to send a note to the president saying: “Try again, you’re missing the obvious.” — Reverend Peter Storey, Simon’s Town
There is a ghost at the Constitutional Court. Not a word has been said in the English-language newspapers about the judge recently awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University and regarded as one of the most brilliant South Africans ever to have graduated from that university.
Justice Edwin Cameron was appointed to the Constitutional Court after having served at the Johannesburg High Court and then the Supreme Court of Appeal with great distinction. It is astonishing that no mention is made of him at all — not even to state that as a white man he cannot be considered for the post. — HA Carman