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OUT IN THE COLD: Suspended ANC Youth League president Julius Malema gestures as he sings on Friday during the leagues three-day annual conference in Pretoria. Picture: Reuters

JULIUS Malema’s swan song address to the ANC Youth League lekgotla on Friday exposed his deep-seated wounds and his resignation to a new political life outside the ANC. He will model himself as a victim, a sacrificial lamb driven out of the party for political motives. It’s a formula that beat the odds and took his nemesis, President Jacob Zuma, from purgatory to the presidency.

If there is anyone who has a right to feel a little smug after Malema’s fall from grace, it is Sihle Zikalala, the ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial secretary. In the time since Malema became ANC Youth League president and held the country in his grip, many on the list of casualties of Malema’s turbulent ride to infamy, such as Zikalala, have been forgotten.

Those who witnessed the incredible events at the ANC’s elective conference at Polokwane in 2007 will remember that it was Zikalala, then ANC Youth League secretary-general, who got the rebellion rolling on the first day of the conference when he stood up and challenged the electronic voting system. This set off a chain of events that saw the delegates repeatedly act in defiance, eventually deposing the incumbent president Thabo Mbeki and many of his lieutenants from the senior leadership of the ANC.

Zikalala and the then ANC Youth League president Fikile Mbalula were a formidable double-act during Zuma’s trials and central to his rise to power in the party. They drummed up support for the then embattled ANC deputy president after he was fired from the government, opened access for him to ANC structures and platforms when the party treated him as a pariah, and ran an intensive grassroots campaign to secure his election.

It was therefore somewhat bizarre that a few months after the Polokwane conference that Zikalala was suddenly viewed as an “enemy agent” and part of the “1996 class project” – parlance for “Mbeki camp” – by some of Zuma’s key supporters. His sin: supporting Saki Mofokeng against the then little- known Julius Malema to succeed Mbalula as ANC Youth League president. Malema’s candidacy was being sponsored, ironically, by senior leaders of the South African Communist Party and the Young Communist League – now among his arch enemies – who vouched for his credentials as a Zuma man.

Apparently that was the only criterion required to secure Malema’s presidency. His mandate was to continue Mbalula’s role as Zuma’s bulldog-in-chief to fend off any legal and political problems. Within months of his election, Malema excelled in this role, becoming the chief public proponent of Mbeki’s recall from office. The Zuma project, it seemed, was safe in his hands and the road to Mahlamba Ndlopfu was kept free of obstacles.

Wounded from the showdown over the ANC Youth League presidency, Mofokeng was dispatched to the North West province on a thankless reconnaissance mission and Zikalala retreated to his home base in KwaZulu-Natal where he became provincial secretary.

But in the run-up to the general elections in 2009, it was already clear, even to Zuma, that Malema – though useful in keeping the prosecuting authorities and political contenders at bay – was a huge liability.

Once, on my return from my home in northern KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma asked me how the election campaign was going in that part of the world, previously one of the IFP’s biggest strongholds.

I told him ANC leaders were having significant problems in rural areas and traditionally conservative communities trying to explain why the ANC was tolerant of Malema’s bad behaviour, particularly his bald disrespect for elders.

Zuma said he had been getting many such reports and was himself deeply concerned.

However, although Malema’s political muscle was at an early development stage and his belligerence could still be easily curtailed then, Zuma hung back on reprimanding him, regardless of the damage to the ANC’s election campaign.

During that campaign, the ANC, as it normally does, relied on the generosity of its benefactors for the use of aircraft and other resources on the campaign trail. Any hostility towards Tokyo Sexwale for his brief frolic as a “third-way” candidate for ANC president was put aside as the party indulged in his munificence.

But after the election came the rumours of Mbalula and Malema being “close” to Sexwale.

And so another anti-Zuma conspiracy was born.

Irrespective of the fact that just about everyone in the alliance was enjoying Sexwale’s generosity, the rumour mill went into overdrive about how his company, Mvelaphanda, was funding Mbalula and Malema with a view to eventually unseating Zuma. It was the foundation on which the dubious Mdluli “intelligence report” was built.

By the end of 2009, Malema had hijacked the national agenda and the ANC Youth League became an indefinite force, raising the political temperature and discomfiture levels in the alliance and the government. The “nationalisation” issue seemed to come out of nowhere and caught many in the ANC and alliance by surprise.

Zuma wriggled out of saying or doing anything against Malema, even when he attacked and mocked members of his cabinet.

The first major public fallout was with the SACP, which led to Malema being booed at the party’s special national congress in Polokwane in December 2009.

He lashed out in response, calling SACP leaders “yellow greedy communists”. But even then, Zuma wouldn’t show his cards and when he addressed that congress after the booing incident, it was difficult to decipher who he sided with.

Zuma even confounded some in his inner circle when, a few weeks later, he declared that Malema could some day be SA’s president.

But just a month later, in April 2010, the breaking point came when Malema unfavourably compared Zuma to Mbeki.

Zuma had been portrayed and caricatured in many demeaning ways during his trials, but nothing stung like being told Mbeki was better than him.

The bringing of the first round of disciplinary charges against Malema signalled the end of a bad romance between two people who had nothing binding them except mutual political expediency.

As much as the ANC would like to peddle Malema’s disciplinary conviction as a move to protect the party from disrepute, the cold truth is he was only punished because he was no longer useful to Zuma.

This is not the case with Zikalala, who will lead KwaZulu-Natal, the biggest ANC province and Zuma’s support base, to the Manguang conference in December.

Therefore, through an ironic twist of fate, Zikalala will have to champion Zuma’s re-election as president, once again the consummate Zuma cheerleader, while Malema looks on from political purgatory.