Khaya Koko | Ronwen, please save Malema’s nose fluids

Hands slicker than Bafana Bafana captain Ronwen Williams were needed to save the nasal penalty discharge draining out of Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema’s nostrils at the party’s recent election manifesto rally. 

If you missed it — or, hopefully, your mouth was not filled with food if you did not — a disgusting greenish goo gushed out of the EFF toy soldier’s nose while making his political speech, with Malema not allowing the filthy fluids to disturb his focus. 

The sticky gunk emerged during the Red Berets’ post-general election wishlist unveiling bash at the Moses Mabhida stadium in Durban in KwaZulu-Natal last Saturday. 

That he carried on with his speech while the gloop lingered on his face for several minutes and almost reached his microphone was a level of flagrance rivalled only by ANC politicians saying Eskom’s perennial power blackouts were not “the end of the world”. 

Speculation has been rife regarding the resultant revolting release, with some claiming white powder created from a certain psychoactive coca plant caused the secretion of mucus at the worst possible time during Juju’s jamboree. 

After all, in his 2022 book Our Poisoned Land: Living in the Shadow of Zuma’s Keepers, journalist and author Jacques Pauw detailed a drug-induced debaucherous binge fest Malema supposedly indulged in at upmarket Johannesburg hotels and apartments. 

Pauw, after saying he interviewed a housekeeper from the lavish Raphael Penthouse Suites in Sandton, owned by EFF benefactor Adriano Mazzotti, wrote that Malema and his cronies — who used the apartment for their nocturnal activities — would leave cracked bottles of Moët French champagne they forgot to take out of the freezer, used condoms, and dirty female underwear behind, among other substances. 

“There were traces of white powder on a DVD cassette. There was a rolled-up note next to the cassette,” wrote Pauw, describing the snort Olympics Juju was allegedly a champion of. 

I posit, however, that Malema’s nasal faux pas was caused by the stress of the auditor general sniffing around the alleged mismanagement affairs of the City of Ekurhuleni. The EFF runs the metro in what it calls a coalition “power-sharing agreement” with the ANC, which runs the City of Johannesburg in turn. 

In Ekurhuleni, finance mayoral committee member Nkululeko Dunga, who is also the EFF’s Gauteng leader, thumbed his nose at allowing the auditor general’s office to release the city’s 2022-23 audit report owing to “disputes” the municipality’s management raised with the national audit committee. 

For an organisation that styles itself as a “government-in-waiting”, it is in the EFF’s interest to block the audit report’s less-than-flattering findings of the party’s financial (mis)management like it were goalkeeper Williams deflecting away dangerous penalty kicks. 

Or, the oozing of mucus could have been caused by the EFF head honcho’s anxiety at the public realising the party’s perpetual pledge to terminate the tender system was nothing but a typical political promise that would not be fulfilled once an organisation ascended to the government. 

For example, Malema — employing the political Pinocchio performance he is known to be partial to — has reneged on implementing the insourcing of workers in Ekurhuleni, mainly security guards and general maintenance staff, despite telling all and sundry that that was the EFF’s policy position. 

At Dunga’s first budget statement delivered in May last year, he failed to set aside funds for the insourcing of workers in the Gauteng metro. When other parties tried to introduce a motion to insource workers in the city, the EFF reverted to its mixed martial arts militancy during November’s council meeting, collapsing the gathering with a level of vicious violence that is usually the preserve of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. 

Yet Malema, with slime shamelessly situated on his face, boldly stated last Saturday — the irony of his famed flip-flopping flying over his head — that the party would insource government contract workers should the electorate deem the EFF worthy of leading South Africa. 

As the Mail & Guardian reported following the manifesto rally, Malema uncharacteristically delivered his speech to what my colleague Lizeka Tandwa described as a “lacklustre audience, having failed to deliver on his promise to fill up the stadium”. 

To be fair, Lizeka also said Malema was “let down by the wet weather conditions, which resulted in many of the party supporters fleeing for cover in the middle of his speech”. 

I, however, believe the fighters fled the sludge streaming down Malema’s face — a situation in which not even Williams at his Wright brothers’ flying best could have saved the country from the sordid sight.