Julius Malema, the president of the African National Congress Youth League, is one of the most high profile figures on the political landscape.
Barely a day goes by without Malema pronouncing on one issue or another. He has a reputation as a motormouth, a loose cannon, a purveyor of politically incorrect gaffes that make president Jacob Zuma seem the voice of moderation. The pick of these have been collected in a book, The World According to Julius Malema, and prompted one former MP to denounce the 28-year-old firebrand as ”an uneducated, loud-mouthed, ignorant and arrogant lout, and an embarrassment to both the ANC and all of South Africa”.
Yet Malema was recently praised by Zuma as a potential future leader; opposition politicians said this was like saying Goebbels was a romantic poet. The youth league is something of a nursery for future presidents, including Nelson Mandela himself, but the prospect of President Malema sends more than a few South Africans running for the hills.
So there was an expectation of fireworks at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Johannesburg last week, where Malema was guest speaker at the annual dinner of the Foreign Correspondents Association. In the lobby I passed a gaggle of Miss World beauty queens who were presumably part of the second most glamorous event of the evening.
In the gloomy ballroom, journalists from around the world sat pushing cutlery and wine glasses around white tablecloths. Malema stood up on a podium behind a microphone and opened fire on the guests.
”The majority of the people, particularly foreign correspondents, report Africa as a continent with no hope and always define it as a continent which is facing massive challenges,” he chided. ”We also know that the majority have decided to report about Africa as if it’s the same without geographic and ethnic differences.”
He complained about the projection that we foreign correspondents offer the rest of the world. ”That African leadership is a group of drunkards, lazy people who can’t think, who are obsessed with women and easy money, and we are corrupt.”
Malema argued that this was already happening with the Soccer World Cup.
”The manner in which the foreign media has reported about us has led to people believing that to visit South Africa you need to be well prepared wearing a bullet proof vest and you must be driven in a bullet proof car.
”Many people think the people who live in South Africa stay with wild animals in their own houses and families. A true story and a true picture of our country has not been told.”
He went on: ”Here where we are sitting we are hosting the beauty queens of the world in this hotel today. They are here preparing for Miss World. None of them has been a victim of criminality, none of them was harassed, none of them was even raped by the people of South Africa. What they’ve experienced is good hospitality by South Africans.”
Last month South African police allegedly shot dead a three-year-old boy because they mistook a metal pipe in his hand for a gun. This followed the death of a hairdresser, also allegedly killed by police because they thought she was in a hijacked car. Malema gave the impression he would prefer the media to play these incidents down.
”You talk about crime as if there’s no crime in the US and Europe and everywhere else in the world … We are again seeing the negative publicity from you that we are killing innocent people while we are grappling with these difficult questions of dealing with the challenges of crime.”
Malema changed gears, talking about the ongoing struggle against white colonisation of the economy and his own rather compelling history. ”My name is Julius Malema. I came into politics at nine years. I grew up in a township called Seshego in Polokwane, Limpopo, to a single mother who was a domestic worker forced by illness to leave her job and come and stay at home.
”I grew up in a highly politicised area. Everything we knew was about the ANC. We wanted to be like Nelson Mandela. We had never seen or known him. To us Nelson Mandela, the way he was articulated, it was like a story about Jesus Christ. We never believed that Nelson Mandela does exist. We thought Nelson Mandela was a tooth fairy made to inspire us.
”But we organised around a common value and the enemy was the most brutal nonsensical regime called apartheid. We knew that when we defeat apartheid, one day we’d have bread on the table. That’s why we joined the struggle at the time.”
Malema rounded off his speech describing himself as a product of township politics and squatter camps, not a self-imposed intellectual.
There were then questions from the floor. The roving mic went to Allister Sparks, the white-haired doyen of South African journalism.
Sparks said: ”I’ve been reporting this part of the world for the past half century and a bit. Listening to you tonight, you remind me an awful lot of Robert Mugabe. Do you admire him and what he’s doing in Zimbabwe?”
Not everyone wants to be compared with Mugabe, a 30-year ruler accused of numerous atrocities and human rights abuses, but Malema evidently didn’t mind. He replied: ”If I sounded like Robert Mugabe, what is wrong with that?
”There is nothing wrong with Robert Mugabe. He has got only one problem. His problem is the approach to land question and how he has treated white minorities in Zimbabwe. But Robert Mugabe is one of the greatest heroes our revolutions have produced and we will forever and ever support him.”
A voice cried out from the darkness: ”You don’t even know what you’re talking about … Madness!”
And so the evening stumbled on. Malema displayed charm and guile but didn’t quite convince me that beneath the I-call-it-as-I-see-it exterior there is anything other than the folksy populism of a Sarah Palin. At least one British journalist I spoke to over dinner said he was fabulous. The South Africans, however, sighed and shook their heads. – guardian.co.uk