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July 8th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
“Those who come to interact with me get a different picture altogether. I
am a good person. I’ve got no bad intentions to harm anybody in this country.”
Seated on an ivory damask armchair in a marble-floored reception room, he had
dispensed with his trademark beret, the T-shirts bearing revolutionary
slogans and the bawdy, bullying tone of speeches and press conferences.
They were replaced by Armani jeans, a soft cream sweatshirt and a more
introspective mood.
Julius Malema was named by Forbes as one of Africa’s 10 most powerful young
men in 2011. Today, he is chastened, eager to keep the media on side and his
name in the headlines following his ejection from the party in February.
Last week, he had to follow the ANC’s five-year National Policy Conference
from afar, on television and via phone calls from his ANC Youth League
allies who were attending.
It must have been agony for someone who joined the party aged nine and has
known little of life outside of it, despite his insistence that he is “fine”
and still confident he “did nothing wrong”.
He conceded he never foresaw his expulsion, having viewed himself as one of
the young Turks who, like former youth league leader Nelson Mandela before
him, pushed a radical agenda with the indulgence of his seniors.
“I was very shocked because I know the ANC to be a very patient
organisation, especially with the youth,” he said.
He laid the blame squarely at the feet of the “insecure” Jacob Zuma
who, he claims, wanted rid of him because he highlighted the “institutionalised
mediocrity” of his administration.
Now, he said, the 70-year-old president has sunk to “stealing” his
ideas. As the country’s developing economy has stagnated – growth is
forecast to be less than 3 per cent this year, not nearly enough to cut into
the 42 per cent unemployment rate among young people – Mr Zuma faces a
restive party and a new generation of post-apartheid voters questioning why
the ANC has not delivered more.
Mr Zuma told conference delegates that the country’s assets remained largely
in the hands of “white males”, and said an “economic
transformation” was needed to match the political one, 18 years after
apartheid.
If the ANC did not take “radical” action, the president warned, the
estimated 40 per cent of South Africans who still live in poverty would lose
patience.
“That’s the impatience we’ve been speaking about but people have not
wanted to listen, saying we’re just a group of young people who are
suffering from excitement,” Mr Malema grumbled. “Maybe our
expulsion was precisely for this purpose, so that those ideas could shine
through.”
Among those discussed at conference were calls to nationalise the country’s
rich gold, diamond, coal and platinum mines, and forcibly reclaim
white-owned land – though nothing was settled.
Such campaigns have spooked investors and confirmed for many critics what they
see as Mr Malema’s lunacy and lack of understanding of basic economics. He
maintained that his nationalisation call is just a populist shorthand, and
that the system can be made more equitable without bankrupting the country.
“Investors must not forget that they were once told a terrorist, Nelson
Mandela, had taken over the country and was going to run it down – yet he
became a world icon,” he said.
“We will never put our country in a disastrous economic situation. We
know the implications of that and they should have confidence in the ANC.”
He insisted that the spectre of Zimbabwe’s land grabs against white farmers
would not be repeated. Land must be taken without compensation but also
without violence, he said, in the public interest and not to the benefit of
politicians, adding pointedly: “There’s not going to be any of Julius
getting the land for free.”
He was unrepentant of his praise for Robert Mugabe. “He is the only
remaining African leader who can still say no to Europe. The rest are very
scared of the imperialist forces.”
His assessment of the ageing Zimbabwean leader suggests some astonishing blind
sides to his judgement. He parroted the party line of Mr Mugabe’s ruling
Zanu PF, blaming Zimbabwe’s economic collapse on Western sanctions, with
little of the analytical thought he seems able to apply to his own country.
Pressed about the Mugabe-ordered massacre of an estimated 20,000 mainly
Ndebele opposition supporters in the 1980s, and the forced clearance of
millions of people from urban shanty towns in the 2005 Operation Clean Out
The Trash, he shrugged: “You must understand that every leader will
have his or her weaknesses.”
However he allowed no such excuses for President Zuma, whom he backed as a
more consensual alternative ANC leader to the aloof President Thabo Mbeki in
2007 – a judgment that with hindsight he regrets.
“He was presented to us as a man of the people who would not continue
with neo-liberal economic policies,” he said.
“But we realised very quickly we had made a mistake. He became worse and
worse and abused state power, used his influence for personal benefits.”
He is not alone in making such claims about the polygamous president. Some
critics have renamed South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment legislation,
aimed at redressing apartheid wrongs, “Zuma Economic Empowerment”
for the benefits it has showered on many of his family and friends.
He has been accused of using state law enforcement services to fight his
political battles, most recently reinstating crime intelligence chief
Richard Mdluli without explanation after he was suspended for fraud and
corruption. Shortly afterwards a letter emerged, reportedly written by Mr
Mdluli, which appeared to promise to help President Zuma win a second term.
Zuma’s ANC, Mr Malema sighed, is something the party’s legendary forefather
Nelson Mandela would be ashamed of.
“President Mandela had so much love and respect for the people. It would
be wrong to even compare him with what we have today,” he said.
He and his fellow youth leaguers view it as their duty to defend the
patriarch’s legacy. “We cannot fold our arms while the ANC of President
Mandela and Oliver Tambo (another former ANC president) is being destroyed
like this,” he said. “They cannot do it because of age, we must do
it for them.”
Mr Malema’s detractors will accuse him of hypocrisy since the baby-faced
revolutionary himself is under investigation for tax evasion and taking
bribes to influence tenders awarded in his home province of Limpopo. That,
he claims, is a “political witchhunt”, pursued in the hope that he
will agree to stop barracking if the investigation is called off.
“Let them come, I am sitting here without any fear because I’ve done
nothing wrong,” he said. “They said they were going to arrest
people within three months but we are still waiting.”
None the less, a rapid chill descends when he is pressed on how he pays for
his Breitling watches, opulent Sandton home and the gleaming Mercedes and
Range Rover parked outside – not to mention the man who described himself to The
Sunday Telegraph as Mr Malema’s “chef and butler”,
The ANC has a long history of using law enforcement to cow political rivals,
but Mr Malema has never adequately explained how he affords such luxuries on
his former ANC salary – now withdrawn – of no more than R50,000 (£4,000) a
month, and earnings from his Limpopo engineering firm, On-Point.
“You know it’s very disrespectful to come into somebody’s house and start
counting what he has,” he snapped. “I’ve accepted to do an
interview with you out of respect.”
How then, do his impoverished supporters feel about him playing the Big Man? “Joe
Slovo (the leading anti-apartheid activist) was white but he fought for
blacks who were oppressed. You don’t have to be poor to understand the
struggles of the poor.”
With a judicious change of subject to family life, cordial relations were
restored. He glowed with pride when asked about his five-year-old son
Ratanang. “Like father like son, it looks like he’s going to be
extreme, big trouble,” he grinned.
His grandmother Sarah, who raised him with his mother away working as a
cleaning lady, still treats him “like a little boy” and it is her
dying wish to see him married, he said.
But he is suspicious of potential girlfriends’ motives. “You don’t know
whether they are looking for the president of the youth league or whether
they are looking for you,” he said.
He is more than happy to laugh at himself – and even at comparisons between
his interviewer’s six-month pregnancy bump and his own, more pronounced
belly.
He pronounced himself unimpressed by the ANC’s reaction, two months ago, to an
exhibition at a Johannesburg gallery of paintings by Brett Murray, a former
anti-apartheid campaigner who is a critic of the ruling party’s
self-enrichment. One of them, The Spear, portrayed Mr Zuma in Lenin-like
pose with his genitals on display.
The ANC outrage that this sparked, with angry protest marches and a boycott of
a national newspaper which published a photograph of it, was “stupid”,
he believes.
“I would have laughed,” he said. “That’s what you get when
you’re a public figure, that’s the price you pay. People were just testing
their power through a non-issue.”
Such pronouncements show for some a wisdom in Mr Malema that most overlook.
Patric Mtshaulana, a respected Johannesburg lawyer and apartheid-era political
instructor for ANC fighters in exile, represented him in the ANC
disciplinary hearings and came to see him as an intelligent and intuitive
politician.
“If he had a Walter Sisulu and an Oliver Tambo around him, to educate him
and smooth his sharp edges, he could easily become a Mandela,” he told The
Sunday Telegraph.
“Without them, and isolated as the ANC leadership is trying to make him,
he could become very dangerous.”
Mr Malema eshewed comparisons with Mandela, or even the suggestion that he
lead the country one day.
His principal aim, he insists, is to return to the fold. “I will go back
to the ANC whenever the right people are there,” he said. “President
Zuma is 70 now, I am 31. I have got all the time on my side.”
In the meantime, he will settle for the role of kingmaker and through his
continuing strong influence in the youth league, back a rival to force out
Mr Zuma at the party’s five-yearly elective conference in December.
His dearest wish for Christmas is a new president. “We can’t continue
like this, not for a day. We need those changes now,” he said.
Once that happens, he believes, his star can only rise again.
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