Julius Malema strikes a chord in South Africa townships
May 5, 2014
Andrew Harding*
[caption id="attachment_9213" align="alignleft" width="150"] Julius Malema says the ANC needs a “wake-up call”[/caption]
A dozen schoolchildren in blue and white uniforms beat their drums earnestly as they escorted Julius Malema’s van down a dirt road and into the impoverished township of Itireleng on a hillside outside Pretoria.
Within seconds, a mood of almost giddy excitement seemed to ripple through the crowd of perhaps 500 people who had gathered on a dusty football pitch in the hot afternoon sun to listen to South Africa’s most divisive, boisterous politician make his election campaign pitch.
An aide in a red beret – the catchy trademark of Mr Malema’s party, the Economic Freedom Fighters – helped to haul the “Commander-In-Chief’s” substantial frame on to the back of a truck, where two loudspeakers were already positioned in front of the crowd.
Mr Malema is 33 and rarely out of the headlines here – a contradictory figure who provokes strong reactions
To some he is a laughable sideshow, egged on by the media and soon to be imprisoned.
Others fear a bullying demagogue whose populist, Mugabe-esque economic plans threaten to wreck South Africa’s economy.
And plenty see him as one of the sharpest critics of all the ills that plague this nation 20 years after the arrival of democracy.
I would settle for a slice of each.
Today, Mr Malema – who faces fraud and racketeering charges as well as bankruptcy stemming from a tax investigation – was wearing his usual man-of-the-people jeans, offset by grey Louis Vuitton shoes, a Burberry shirt, Ferrari jacket and of course his own EFF beret.
South Africa’s President, Jacob Zuma, can thrill a crowd with his singing, dancing, and isiZulu wisecracks. But no-one can quite match Mr Malema for his mesmerising blend of thunder and comedy.
In the course of an hour’s unscripted speech, he mercilessly ridiculed Mr Zuma for the tax-payers’ millions spent on upgrading his private home, and said Nelson Mandela would be spinning in his grave if he could see what the governing African National Congress (ANC) had become, and how a corrupt, narrow elite was profiting at the expense of a marginalised black majority.
But between the jabs and the jokes, what he did most often and perhaps most effectively, was to make promises – to bring water and proper toilets to the area; to double the social grants upon which about 16 million South Africans depend; to seize white-owned land and redistribute it to the poor; to nationalise the mines.
Nkemnji Global Tech
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