The EFF now has the licence to lead a charge, and it finally feels like the mythology around Malema the doomed, wandering alone through his rows of cabbages, has imploded, writes Janet Smith.
Johannesburg - The elderly white man jumps from his seat behind the till, pushing his chair back in a bit of a clatter. It’s taken him a moment to register. “Julius!” he shouts out, pushing his spectacles up before launching himself towards the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you.”
His arms are wide open as he skins the counter.
He had done a double-take when Julius Malema walked into the quiet Centurion nursery with an entourage of red berets. It was as if no one had noticed the silver BMW pull in to the parking lot with its lights on, followed by a short train of cars.
Commissar Floyd Shivambu had got out first, followed by spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, who recced the coffee shop out back.
Once the man behind the till realised just who had stepped in, out of the blue in a bright pink shirt on a Monday morning, it didn’t take long for him to envelop the commander-in-chief in a brotherly embrace. Malema was simultaneously strange and familiar.
Tears immediately flick at the rims for a black nursery worker who has offered to show us where to have breakfast.
“Hey, I like him,” the man shakes his head from side to side, slightly out of breath. He can’t quite exhale. He says it’s the surprise of seeing Malema in the flesh.
We leave the EFF leader with the man at the till, and the worker speaks with a pressing confidence as he picks out a path between the fruit trees and the vygies. “Yes, I’m going to vote for him. I think we need change. We’re ready to take a chance.”
Five minutes later, a young Afrikaans couple politely approach Malema just as he sits down. He prefers to be outside, where the world smells like jasmine.
The couple want pictures.
“She’s a marketing student,” the young man bursts out, a little flustered, aiming his iPhone at Malema smiling, arm-in-arm with his girlfriend. “You should hire her.”
Malema chats to them briefly and then suddenly, they and the moment are gone.
But it surely wouldn’t have taken long for those images to go viral, and in a most important week for his new political life, Malema’s low-key celebrity is going to be an invaluable advantage. The EFF launches on Sunday in Marikana.
Exhausting weeks of door-to-door among the beleaguered mineworkers of North West have brought them to this point. Now, their zeal must deliver.
The party expects thousands of nouvelle red berets to march onto the Small Koppie from 10am, crossing the same lamentable ground where their fellow workers were slaughtered by police last August 16. Potentially startling in its darkly ritualistic occasion, a mighty show of support for a man who seized their tragedy will be critical to his careful re-engineering. But it’s not only the working class the EFF needs.
“White people behave like this a lot,” Malema says as he sits down after the photo op with the couple. He orders a rooibos with honey and an English breakfast from an overawed waiter “They love to take pictures. Black people are happy about seeing us but they don’t ask for autographs. White people always want pictures. It’s very, very amazing.”
He keeps his eyes on the garden: “I have never met a grumpy white person, a person who hurls insults at me or threatens me, in public. Instead I’ve had a situation where they are queueing up to see me.”
Black or white, it is indeed the queues that Malema and the EFF leadership are most interested in courting as they start to muscle in on the zeitgeist. They want to tap the disillusionment. They want to prise out the disgust at the autumn polls, and turn those emotions into a significant enough percentage to leverage influence over the unravelling of the ANC.
A bakkie jammed with singing red berets rounds the corner of Lenchen Avenue in Centurion to park inside the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) offices. Malema would shortly arrive for the handing over of the EFF’s Certificate of Registration – an important piece of paper which says it is a political party in good standing that can stand in all 2014 elections.
Afterwards, Malema speaks in a quiet tone to the supporters who had been singing anti-Zuma and anti-Mantashe songs in the parking lot. They are 100 percent Juju. He addresses them as “fighters”.
“This presents us with a serious challenge of galvanising support. Organise and mobilise! A giant has been born!”
A throaty collective rises up to cheer, and bottles of JC le Roux pop like crackers.
One of the EFF leaders quips under his breath from the sidelines: “This is too European.” But the moment has been made. The EFF now has the licence to lead a charge, and it finally feels like the mythology around Malema the doomed, wandering alone through his rows of cabbages, has imploded.
“There was never such a period in my life,” he says of newspaper reports earlier this year that “even friends” were no longer taking his calls.
“There was never a moment where there was a relative political lull in my life. Yes, there was a material difference in that we were no longer part of the elite meetings of the ANC, with those in positions of power. They had started distancing themselves. They couldn’t take our calls because they believed they were being monitored.
“But already when we got expelled, the Friends of the Youth League was set up and we became so involved in that. Also, we were moving towards the ANC conference at Mangaung at that time and because we couldn’t do official work to try and influence the structures, we did a lot of underground work. We did everything we could to try and change the balance of forces.”
His use of the word “we” is careful. Malema is exquisitely attuned to the EFF’s social ethos.
“We were very busy,” he continues. “We kept being needed elsewhere to give perspective on why change was necessary. After Mangaung, the attacks just intensified from those who held a different view.”
Of course, the fight for that different view cost him. He’s got his fists up.
“People I had sung about, who I had respected so much, who I thought were brave, turned out to be cowards. I couldn’t believe that they were all afraid of one man. These were people who had fought apartheid, who had defeated a murderous regime. Now we know they were in the majority actually spies. That’s why they survived to the end of apartheid.
“They were never revolutionaries. The genuine revolutionaries were killed. I’ve spoken about the dictatorship before.
“We felt like, without a very aggressive alternative, we were marching straight towards that.
“So in June, I made the clarion call and then in July, the decision was taken.”
Malema had, however, probably made that decision when the 43 miners were shot dead. “I had become an ordinary South African, speaking about politics wherever I found myself. I still had a sense that the ANC could self-correct and that Mangaung would reshape it, especially after Marikana, but it became worse, worse, worse. Actually, the rot could be felt more deeply after that, so we got the feeling of the people. I got invited back.”
It’s difficult to tell if it’s anger, but now he’s leaning forward. He’s put his knife and fork down neatly on the plate.
He doesn’t raise his voice.
“I believe we know the ANC will only become more tribal and more right wing, and we must remember that in many African states, the leadership became pigs after they had been in power, and started eating their children. We can’t allow ourselves to suffer from that kind of self-destruction.”
Malema explains: “There is no one who will oppose him, Zuma. No one who will be tolerated. Only dictators meet dissenting voices with violence.”
He’s talking about when the EFF was denied its appointment to speak at Unisa last month. He tells stories of how members around the country have been beaten up and lost their jobs. Some have been arrested. It was quickly onerous for the party to get permission almost anywhere for marches and rallies. It still is. He mentions suspended Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
“We know that even in exile, Zuma dealt with promising alternatives like that. It’s history. He’s a man who doesn’t have limitations. But we’re not cry babies. We say to South Africans, avoid injustice by standing up against it or one day someone may come to you and refuse you the right to hold a meeting. We’re here to remind our people that tomorrow will be better than today.”
Before we leave, Malema’s tapping into his BlackBerry, loading some airtime for his six-year-old son, Ratanang. The little boy is an Idols fan and wants to vote for his favourite contestant.
“We’re on our way to Polokwane now,” he says, with a broad smile. “I’m going to see him now, now, now.”
But he admits there’s a fear for the lives of the EFF leadership, and the state will not provide protection, as it did not for assassinated SACP leader, Chris Hani, in 1993. “It’s scary. It’s a huge responsibility we’ve taken on. We’ve said: Let’s prepare ourselves and our families. But most of the time, we are amongst the masses, and they have become our protection.
“We have an appointment with the future that we are going to meet.”
Malema on ...
Minorities
“The minorities have been beneficiaries of the democratic system. The ANC did everything in its power to make the minority feel comfortable and make the majority uncomfortable. Now it is time for them to accept that the majority must benefit – and that must start now.
“We’re non-racial, but not ashamed to say, bring dignity. Begin by making Africans feels confident and comfortable in their own country. We’re calling for this in a strong way.”
Media
“When the media said we were out of public life, suffering somewhere else, it was not an important thing that matters in my life. The media will always have something to say.”
The ANC
“The ANC is going to the extreme right, where the opposition in South Africa finds itself. It’s speaking the same language as Helen Zille, and the ANC is having to start competing with them on the basis of that reactionariness. Their policies and promises are almost the same. The struggle between them is who dances and who sings the best. Our people might still want to be loyal to the name, to history. But we say: Can you eat the name? Can you eat history?”
Nelson Mandela
“People say we can’t leave the organisation of Nelson Mandela. But the organisation is no longer that of Nelson Mandela. Madiba never stood for cultural stereotypes, for corruption and mediocrity, for jobs for friends.”
Youth
“The ANC Youth League made politics fashionable when we were there. We wanted vibrancy. We wanted excitement. Once we gave young people that assurance, they responded. They’re highly conscious. They’re ready to contribute, but now they’re disillusioned. If they don’t have a political alternative next year, they’ll pull out of voting. So we know the youth will appreciate us.”
Good governance
“We (the EFF) are having lectures and workshops to prepare us as a government-in-waiting. We’re learning about good governance and anti-corruption.”
Jacob Zuma
“Look at Nkandla, the tapes, Richard Mdluli. This is about the protection of one individual.”
The judiciary
“(Zuma) has a serious wish to change the judicial system, to make it one of the corrupted institutions. Jeff (Radebe) was deployed precisely to go and do that, to make it serve the ruling elite. Once this is done, we can forget about what was achieved in 1994.”
The Constitutional Court
“They (the ruling elite) want it. They want to paralyse it. There’s only one man fighting for it, the only man left with any credibility, and that’s (deputy chief justice) Dikgang Moseneke. They’re waiting for his retirement day. Then they can be in control. They want to win that court through the appointment of majority judges, and will then amend the constitution so the chief (Zuma) can avoid prosecutions.”
The Star