This is not ridding the ANC of rot...

Independent Newspapers

ANCYL leader Julius Malema. Photo: Bongiwe Mchunu.

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• Malema detractors celebrate his demise

Who remembers that October day in 2009 when Julius Malema became the ANC’s heir apparent? It was a sunny Sunday in Seshego, the township where Malema was born and bred, and he was sharing a platform with Jacob Zuma, who had become president of the country five months earlier.

The two men were still political allies at that time and fresh in Zuma’s mind was the footwork Malema had done for him in his comeback from political ruin. And as the pair sang and danced that afternoon, the president lauded his junior partner “a leader in the making”, a young man worthy of “inheriting the ANC”.

It got a front-page splash the following morning in the sister titles of this newspaper and kept commentators busy throughout that day. A future with Malema at the helm had unsettled most minds.

“I don’t know,” Malema said when I asked him why the president had given him such a ringing endorsement at that point. “But I’m not complaining.”

The young man was so chuffed that a couple of weeks later he asked for a copy of that photo of “me and Zuma jiving”. The Sunday Independent obliged and he blew it up and had it framed and to this day the image hangs in the ante-room of Malema’s office in Luthuli House.

But two years on and Malema is not even worthy of holding on to that office, following Thursday’s dramatic ruling by the National Disciplinary Committee. Some have even suggested since then that Malema is no longer worth associating with either, now that his political stock is in ruins and with worse still to come if the charges of alleged corruption, fraud and money laundering that hang over his head take proper shape.

But who remembers June 14, 2005 when former president Thabo Mbeki sacked Zuma as his deputy?

He made a spectacular comeback in the space of two years and then took the party by storm.

The odds are heavily stacked against Malema making a similar return, but as history has since taught us, Zuma’s comeback had less to do with him and more to do with unseating Mbeki as party leader.

History will also show us that this week’s ruling against Malema has less to do with party discipline and more to do with Zuma’s own ambitions.

If it was party discipline and political reason that really motivated Derek Hanekom’s committee, then why didn’t they act sooner? Malema has given them ample reason to do so these past three years. And why don’t they reel in the other offenders that continue to bring the party into disrepute?

While Malema licks his wounds this weekend, there are men and women scattered throughout Limpopo who are keeping their heads held low.

They were his foot soldiers, the people who did his bidding both within the party, in provincial government and in business.

They acted for Malema but also for many senior ANC figures in Limpopo.

They were the people who would collect the cash, pay the bribes and settle the scores.

Each and every one of them acted unlawfully, and in the name of the ANC, yet little mention is made of their actions or the fact that Limpopo has become a twilight zone these past couple of years, riddled with corruption from top to bottom.

Take the case of two well-known men in Polokwane who claimed fame as corruption busters since early last year. Throughout that period they kept themselves busy digging up dirt and feeding journalists reams of hard and damning evidence about what was taking place behind the closed doors of the provincial government.

But when Polokwane’s political elite began to feel the heat in recent months, they immediately turned to the two men and pleaded with them to keep a lid on their dirty affairs.

Money talks and for a significant sum, the two agreed and are now trying to keep the media off course.

As the ANC would say, “they are also members in good standing”.

But if I know the identity of these two men, so too does the ANC, yet they conveniently turn a blind eye to the way in which they and all of Malema’s other foot soldiers are calling the party into disrepute.

So that collective sigh of relief that echoed on Thursday was a tad premature.

The ANC may have sidelined Malema, but the ruling party did not rid its ranks of the rot and South Africa has not rid itself of its problems.

Zuma merely ousted one of his enemies as he clears the path to Mangaung.

The praise heaped upon Zuma for taking such a brave move was perhaps a tad misplaced as well. It is precisely his lack of leadership that has brought the ruling party to this point. - Sunday Independent

* Forde is the author of An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘new’ ANC