Youth league president Julius Malema’s slash-and-burn campaign against the ANC alliance continued unabated this week – but he might finally have bitten off more than he can chew.
This week he took on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and then tried to undo the merger of Medunsa and the University of Limpopo, pre-empting a government announcement that a task team would investigate its problems.
Now the NUM has hit back, warning that miners would not hesitate to take the law into their own hands and sort Malema out if he didn’t shut up.
“This is an industry where you must not play with the emotions of people,” NUM spokesman Lesiba Seshoka said, saying it was quite a different environment to a university.
The spat between the league’s enfant terrible and one of South Africa’s toughest unions erupted in a war of words after Malema urged that the mines be nationalised. The NUM responded by calling the league “juvenile”, warning that loose talk could cost half a million jobs.
League spokesman Floyd Shivambu retorted, saying they were “seriously considering” setting up branches at shafts.
On Friday, ANCYL secretary-general Vuyiswa Tulelo moved to distance the league from Shivambu’s comment, saying it was “an idea that (Shivambu) got wherever” and it still had to be brought to the league’s leadership structures.
Seshoka wryly said establishing league branches on mines would be a “revolutionary move”, and mineworkers were tough people, known to express themselves violently.
Perhaps still mindful of his booing at the SACP’s congress last year, Malema also caused havoc this week for Blade Nzimande, the SACP general secretary and Minister of Higher Education, by promising irate Medunsa students in Pretoria he would personally push for the undoing of its merger with the University of Limpopo, 300km to the north.
Nzimande and Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi scrambled to convene a press conference on the sidelines of the SA Democratic Teachers Union congress in Boksburg on Thursday to explain that a task team was already looking into the matter.
Analyst Steven Friedman from the Centre for the Study of Democracy said it was vintage Malema “bully politics”. “It is the kind of politics that says ‘you tried to discipline me, and I am a tough guy and will come and throw my weight around’.”
Malema and others in the league might yet face disciplining by the ANC for storming the stage at the ANC’s national general council in Durban last month. It might be a safer bet than facing the wrath of the mineworkers.