If a stranger landed on our strange shores, they would soon conclude that Julius Malema must be the local Generalissimo. He is a swaggering 30-year-old demagogue who has become mysteriously rich despite earning a modest salary as the African National Congress Youth League President. Crass and abusive, he flaunts his wealth while loudly claiming to champion “the poorest of the poor”.
Yet no amount of press exposés seem to dent the fact that Malema sets the political pace in South Africa today, like Benito Mussolini before his Blackshirts marched on Rome in 1922.
This is because most forces in our society with more real influence are either engrossed in governmental power struggles, intent on making money, or are too sated materially to be troubled about the anger boiling below. This is a vacuum that Malema fills with considerable cunning.
Unemployment stands at more than 40 per cent, and up to 65 per cent among young people. No developed country could sustain such massive levels of inequality without a revolution.
Big business, white and black, repeats the same rigid “free-market” formulas which have helped to deliver such shocking inequality. And while workers’ already pitiable pay has shrunk in real terms, last year executives in top companies received average pay rises of 23 per cent and bonuses of 56 per cent.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the South African Communist Party has lost any meaningful voice. Former President Thabo Mbeki shrewdly neutered the SACP by appointing party politburo members to head the privatisation ministries.
The SACP is plodding, compromised and aloof, offering no hope to the disenfranchised. Meanwhile, stuck in the middle, the leadership of the ANC appears directionless, gripped by its own in-house election next year. Jacob Zuma leads the way on fudge. Even when publically insulted by his boorish junior, Julius Malema, Zuma stays silent.
Malema has been calling for nationalisation of the mines. But newspaper investigations reveal that he has been taking kickbacks from companies (run by friends and relatives) benefiting from privatisation in his home province, Limpopo. The Youth League leader responds by denouncing “white imperialists” who live in Sandton, the most expensive suburb of Johannesburg. Malema himself not only lives in Sandton, but is currently knocking down his large house there to build another one, bigger and flashier – complete with a security bunker in case of “civil disturbance”.
Most of the poor do not seem to care about such breathtaking hypocrisy. They don’t seem to mind that he also bought a large house for his mother and a farm for himself – both with cash. For millions who live forgotten in shacks, Malema seems to be the only one who champions their cause.
Many comfortable, educated South Africans (black and white) sneer at Malema’s lack of polish and the fact that he even failed woodwork at school. But Julius Malema’s true potential was revealed by the fact that, accused of hate speech in a civil case, he arrived at the Johannesburg High Court flanked by four bodyguards ostentatiously wielding assault rifles. The symbolism was all too obvious.
Many affluent Italians, after the First World War, thought Mussolini was a crude clown. But while they blithely ignored increasingly serious social problems, Mussolini switched from socialism to fascism and thuggishly swept to power.
Mussolini, wrote his biographer Dennis Mack Smith, knew the value of alternating menace and conciliation. One of his closest collaborators, Cesare Rossi, described Il Duce as having, “a marvellous facility for playing the most diverse and contradictory parts one after the other… One day he says a certain thing is white, the next day he says it is black.” Recently the Youth League leader first savagely lambasted trade union leaders and then, days later, lavishly praised them.
Mussolini admitted to being “reactionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances”. This sounds horribly familiar. It’s a combustible, highly dangerous combination. Once again, as in the dying years of apartheid, the elite – now multi-racial – are ignoring that flashing warning light.
