FOR SOME years Julius Malema, leader of the African National Congress militant Youth League, has been a serious thorn in the side of the party and its leadership. The 30-year-old demagogue, who was expelled on Thursday for five years, is seen as a threat not only to the ANC’s cultivated image as a business-friendly, non-racial, centrist party, but also internally as the most serious challenge to its leader President Jacob Zuma and his prospects of a second term as state president.
While Malema may be easily dismissed as a dangerous polarising maverick, he is in reality an important political figure, an expression of festering disillusionment and anger in the townships at endemic poverty, and of a lively class conflict for the soul of a once-revolutionary mass party. Malema may be seen to represent the party’s past, but in fact reflects a powerful, possibly majority, radicalism among the rank and file, and which actually contributed to propelling Zuma into office in 2009. The latter has reason to be fearful.
What appears to have been the final straw has been the mass mobilisation by Malema of support for expropriation of the country’s mineral resources and land. Last month, he led thousands of supporters on a march from Johannesburg and Pretoria, calling for jobs and nationalisation of an industry valued at $2.5 trillion. Youth unemployment stands at close to one in two.
A parting of the ways with the ANC was almost inevitable. He was recently successfully prosecuted for incitement to hatred for singing an apartheid-era freedom song that included lyrics calling on people to “Shoot the Boer”. And the party charges were prompted by his call for the overthrow of the Botswana government, public insults of ANC leaders, and disruption of a meeting. He is also under investigation by the police over links to companies that won state tenders. The party charge of undermining party unity and damaging its reputation was unanswerable, although Malema and the Youth League, which still backs him, are determined to appeal the suspension.
He has been the public face of opposition in the party to Zuma who may yet still face a challenge at the party congress at the end of 2012 (the party leader is automatically its candidate for state president). And the president will be all too aware that even if Malema can now only shout from the sidelines, the social forces and contradictions in South African society that he represents remain.The threat continues.