Many years ago, when Julius Malema was being dismissed as nothing more than a motormouth, I argued that commentators were dismissing him at their own peril. I knew then, long before the establishment of the EFF, that Malema was going to shape the politics of SA.
You only needed to have seen the reaction of young people whenever he spoke, that the man was influential and that his word was taken very seriously, especially by the disenfranchised, working-class black youth.
Malema is appealing, but his real appeal lies not so much in his persona, but in our collective dejection with the ANC. After decades of wading through the decay created by the ANC within the state, and the glacial pace of transformation in the country, it stands to reason that society is desperate for an alternative.
It is not an accident of history that the typical EFF supporter is young, poor, disenfranchised and black. It is this demographic that the ANC-led government has failed most.
The danger with Malema and why we should be worried about him is that he is a metonymy of the EFF. The EFF is his property to do with whatever he so pleases. His word is the supreme law – a reality that he has demonstrated many times.
But the danger I want to look at is the one he demonstrated last week while addressing the community of Ackerville in Emalahleni, Mpumalanga.
There, he told scores of unemployed, working-class black youths that there is no shame in bearing children they cannot afford to raise, because an EFF government would feed them and pay for their education. Berating them for having few children, he said that children of the poor would have everything free under his government. For this reason, they should have 10 or more babies per person as state welfare would take care of them.
Malema also peddled the widely accepted lie that R500bn of Covid-19 relief funds was blown – a lie made believable by the corruption that did occur, but which did not amount to this amount that is in fact the totality of the economic support package announced by the government.
Malema knows that social welfare in our country is becoming more unstainable as our tax pool shrinks dramatically owing to rising levels of unemployment and disinvestment by companies. He knows that to sustain it, we are going to have to continuously borrow money, which will be repaid through increasing income taxes that are already suffocating the employed minority in our country, many of whom earn too little to begin with.
Malema knows that a few weeks ago, the food poverty lines were revised upwards, and that social grants money is below the food poverty line, meaning that even as they receive it, families are still living in poverty.
He knows that the government does not have an endless supply of money. He knows that the economic situation prevailing here has taken many other countries, better developed than ours, to the brink of near collapse.
Despite this, he stands before desperate people peddling lies and making promises that he knows are not realistic or sustainable. He stands before disenfranchised people encouraging them to dig themselves deeper into the hole of poverty and hunger.
He does this knowing how influential he is but more importantly, knowing that the EFF is not likely to ever be a governing party. And so, he sets parameters for chaos that he will not have to account for or deal with, in the process playing with people’s lives. This is wrong and we must call the impolitic Malema by his proper name: a very dangerous man.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.