Pretoria - For Julius Malema, any tragedy, societal ill or leadership vacuum - real or imagined - is an opportunity that must be grabbed to further political aims and objectives.
With a sharp eye to spot that opportunity, the shrewd and smart political operator knows exactly what to do with it and what to say to the disenchanted.
Until August 16, when the police massacred 34 Lonmin Marikana miners, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the axed ANC Youth League leader had retired from politics.
He was probably sitting in his home town of Seshego in Limpopo, pondering his next move.
The gunshots of the last police officer’s R5 had hardly fallen silent on the killing fields of Marikana when the firebrand was on the scene armed with his charm, brass neck and a loudhailer.
“Jacob Zuma does not care about you,” he told the angry miners, adding that the police killed them to protect the mining interests of ANC national executive member and businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, who has shares in Lonmin.
Within days, he was dictating terms in Marikana through his Friends of the ANCYL.
He ordered a team of cabinet ministers out of his memorial services, helped miners lay criminal charges against the police and demanded the resignation of Zuma and his ally, Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa. That wasn’t all.
Seeing how most of the miners had warmed to him, he promptly ramped up his “mining revolution” to other mines, including Gold Fields KDC West in Carletonville, south of Joburg.
Disenchanted soldiers, who had been at loggerheads with the government over poor working conditions and low wages, were his next target.
Over the past fortnight, the self-styled commander-in-chief of economic freedom fighters told miners that Ramaphosa chose to pay R18 million for a buffalo but refused to pay them R12 500 a month.
He rubbished the National Union of Mineworkers, the dominant union in the mining sector and Cosatu’s biggest affiliate, and demanded the resignation of its secretary, Frans Baleni.
The easy, superficial view is that Malema is opportunisitically hogging the limelight after being expelled from the ruling party for misconduct early this year.
But there is a bigger picture here - and an overarching strategy too - Zuma himself.
Malema’s endgame is to mobilise anybody and everybody against Zuma before Mangaung, weaken him beyond repair, convince not just the party, but the entire country and the world that Zuma cannot lead, and drum up support that might save him if Zuma orders his arrest on charges of alleged tender fraud and corruption.
A study of Malema’s statements and actions point to a well-crafted political programme, sponsored by senior members in the ANC national executive committee, to convince anyone who will listen that Zuma has no leadership capacity in the midst of rolling crises and protests.
The country is “leaderless”, as Malema repeatedly says, with the corollary being that it was a mistake to elect Zuma in Polokwane five years ago.
It is no coincidence that the people and organisations Malema has targeted since Marikana have something in common: they are all backers of Zuma’s bid for a second term at the ruling party’s elective national conference in December.
Malema wants Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe to take over as ANC president.
Ramaphosa, who chaired the party’s national disciplinary appeals committee that confirmed Malema’s expulsion, holds a stake in Lonmin.
Ramaphosa was ordered to share his profit with the poor. Surprisingly, other prominent mine bosses, such as Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale, seen as Malema’s ally, have been spared the same demands or public insults.
The NUM has publicly endorsed Zuma’s second term ambition - and just as quickly found itself as a key target for Malema’s vitriolic anti-Zuma attacks after Marikana.
Malema, who desperately wants his ANC membership back, is also trying to show Zuma and other party members that he is more dangerous outside the party than inside.
He is hoping to force them to apply former US vice-president Lyndon B Johnson’s saying, that “I’d rather have the guy inside my tent p***ing outside, rather than outside my tent p***ing in”.
He wants to force the party’s leaders to agree that he is causing more damage when not tied by the ANC constitution and code of conduct.
Already, some in the ANC are privately saying it was a mistake to sack Malema because he has become so dangerous.
By showing up at almost every anti-government or service delivery protest, he is creating a wedge between the government and the poor, especially the youth.
In a country where nearly 70 percent of the unemployed are between 18 and 35 years old, any instigation of a rebellion by the jobless spells disaster for authorities and Zuma in particular.
Furthermore, it will be difficult for the government or ANC politicians to rubbish him in the eyes of ordinary people if he is seen to be the one leader standing at the forefront of the struggle against poverty, inequality and unemployment.
However, Malema has a pressing personal issue: the Hawks are said to have been ready for weeks to pounce on him on charges of alleged tender fraud and corruption. One way of staying the president’s hand could be to build a reliable support base outside the league to defend him if and when he gets arrested.
And that claim, if made, may find resonance among some, including the miners themselves. The irony of course is that Malema won’t be the first to play on the emotions of the masses. Zuma himself did so with such success in the months he spent in the political wilderness before Polokwane.
Malema said last year that he was “preparing for life outside the ANC, and possibly even jail” as it became clear that the party’s disciplinary committee would find against him.
The mistake Malema’s detractors seem to make, just as Zuma’s detractors did and continue to do, is to cling to the myth that he is just an ordinary man, a simple, uneducated man. He is not.
Malema is intelligent, smart, brave and articulate. He knows how to exploit the emotions of the disenchanted for personal benefit.
The question is what he will do at Mangaung if his allies fail to dislodge Zuma, or in his words, if “Mangaung fails to liberate us”.
History has not been kind to those who defy the ANC by breaking away and forming their own organisations, as Robert Sobukwe’s Pan Africanist Congress in 1959 and Cope in 2008 will attest.
But most importantly, Malema, like Zuma and former president Thabo Mbeki, is an ANC ideologue.
For him, it is the party of Chief Albert Luthuli and Oliver Tambo or nothing.
He grew up in the ANC from the age of 13 and his blood is simply too “green, black and yellow” to leave the movement, as he likes to boast.
If he fails at Mangaung, expect more of the same. He will ramp up the pressure on Zuma until the president is either ousted or Malema is behind bars. There simply isn’t any middle ground.
Pretoria News