Maravi

(NEWZIMBABWE) Ignore Malema at your peril

Ignore Malema at your peril
Posted By Joram Nyathi on 10 Jun, 2010 at 5:08 pm

THERE are only two ways to deal with ANC Youth League president Julius Malema: either the whites physically eliminate him, or the ANC sacrifices him. Neither option resolves the key question of Malema’s popularity: the quest to give meaning to African independence by taking control of our natural resources.

The whites will not kill him because they are wise enough not to precipitate the same catastrophe which they fear an unrestrained Malema represents, and the ANC as a party can only sacrifice Malema at irreparable damage to itself and its credibility as a revolutionary movement. But it risks sacrificing both the man and principle through a lack of resoluteness in pursuit of what is historically just. That is if President Jacob Zuma wants to earn himself the tag of Mr Nice Guy, and forgets why the poor black majority voted him into power.

Because of their fear, the whites, especially farmers and big corporates, have shifted the task of dealing with Malema to the ANC itself. In particular, President Zuma is now being asked to deal with this Frankenstein monster which he created to fight his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. It’s a pretty clever trick to get the ANC to fight itself while exonerating those who want a weakened ruling party which won’t threaten their vested interests.

For their part, whites are fighting Malema at the symbolic level. He is semi-literate if not a “buffoon” like Zuma himself. Malema poses a threat to freedom of expression and the press. Malema exposes Zuma’s partiality for Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe against MDC-T as a mediator in the Zimbabwean political crisis. His “kill the boer” song is racist. Malema is a threat to foreign investment.

So it was that all powerful media in SA were in celebratory mood when it was announced that Malema was going to face disciplinary action from the ANC for all these sins. It was time to silence Malema once and for all. The ANC played along, but luckily retreated at the brink last week. Malema was fined only R10,000 for disrespecting Zuma. He was also ordered to go for political lessons. Slap on the wrist, sorted!

That is as much as the ANC can go. The Youth League in most of the country’s provinces is fully behind Malema. They have made it clear they elected Malema for his radicalism, which is clearly lacking in the older generation. The ANC is fully aware that silencing Malema is not the same thing as resolving the cause he is championing.

In turning against Malema instead of confronting recalcitrant white farmers and mining conglomerates who won’t share anything with poor blacks, the ANC leadership is showing unforgivable cowardice. It leaves future generations a terrible legacy of a people who won the liberation war but refused to take control of the country.

The ANC, and white South Africans in particular, need to accept a little truth. The Malema phenomena is more than an individual. It is an idea. He represents a generation which is ready to confront a monstrous evil in the form neo-colonialism and its more insidious sibling, the liberal ideology. South Africa’s problems are not going to be solved by killing Julius Malema or dismissing him from the ANC for telling the truth.

South Africans, black and white, must confront head-on the material conditions which breed the likes of Malema. It was because of these conditions that Nelson Mandela went to prison for 27 years. The “ideal” for which he said he was “prepared to die” is still a pipedream for the majority blacks while the whites have appropriated the man to themselves and turned him a mock idol on his people.

What is sad is that while white South Africans are aware of the danger to themselves of eliminating Malema, they are refusing to learn plain lessons from the stubborn stance chosen by their cousins in Zimbabwe. The land reform which they so much revile began on a willing-seller-willing-buyer paradigm. The approach didn’t work because those who “owned” the land asked for “market prices” which they knew the government could not afford. They would not part with fertile farms, with some farmers as late as the year 2000 still owning up to 13 farms each.

They thought they could still keep their farms in perpetuity by instigating their indigent farm labourers to vote en mass in the February 2000 referendum against a new constitution which would allow government to seize these farms without paying compensation except for improvements such as houses and other infrastructure. They won the vote but lost the farms.

They thought they could stop the process by attacking leaders of war veterans who spearheaded the land reform as lawless thugs. Looking at the travesty going on in SA, one sees people who still believe “not in a thousand years” will they share their ill-gotten wealth with blacks.

Zimbabwe is now in the second phase of the struggle for control of its natural resources: the indigenisation programme in which blacks must ultimately acquire 51% equity in all foreign-owned companies worth more than US$3,5 million. (In the original regulations the figure was US$500,000).

In South Africa’s case, Malema might be one of those who benefited from black economic empowerment programmes of the past 16 years. His detractors prefer to see patronage as the only source of his wealth. Whichever is the case, he lives the poverty of the poor majority everyday to be able to tap into their anger and frustration with a revolution which appears to have ended prematurely before it could deliver on the promise of independence. These are the realities which should exercise the collective conscience of South Africans of all races. Instead, what one sees is a preoccupation with form over content by most white South Africans.

Malema might be semi-literate, according to those who benefited under apartheid, but he knows there are millions of black South Africans who are worse than he is, thanks to racial segregation which favoured the white race in everything, including the quality of education. Most of the cadres who fought the liberation wars in Southern Africa were semi-literate or illiterate. So that epithet against Malema hits at the core of all those who sacrificed their education to liberate their country, but today wallow in poverty because they are illiterate! How can history be so cruel?

The crushing irony is that our countries are full of literate black journalists who are historically illiterate. So illiterate in fact that they believe it is right to stop Malema from singing liberation war songs like “Dubul’ ibhunu”. Like one sage observed: “A history forgotten is a future lost.” So illiterate that they believe a SADC Tribunal seeking to reverse Zimbabwe’s land reform should be enforced just to stop South Africa and Namibia from embarking on similar programmes.

The ANC, as the oldest liberation movement in the region, needs to provide decisive leadership. One can only hope that the meeting of five former liberation movements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, last week breathed new life into the ANC. Silencing Malema can only prolong the inevitable. It is more likely to bring forth a 100 angrier, semi-literate Malemas so long as things don’t change for the black man.

We are too familiar with this hypocrisy in Zimbabwe where all rights count for blacks, except economic rights, that is the right to own their God-given natural resources.

Joram Nyathi is the communications director of the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee – a multipartisan body overseeing Zimbabwe’s power sharing government. He writes in his personal capacity.

Labels: JORAM NYATHI, JULIUS MALEMA, LAND REFORM

posted by MrK @ 5:23 PM