LIKE a cornered tiger, ANC Youth League president Julius Malema’s
claws are out.
Occasionally bequeathed with a maturity way beyond his years you
can understand why President Jacob Zuma believes Malema has good leadership
qualities that need nurturing.
Faced with louder and louder calls for him to take action against
the youth leader, Zuma has steadfastly stood by his man, declaring his colourful
effervescence to resemble that of founding president Nelson Mandela’s when he
was young.
That may once have been true, but Malema is the worst of
politicians and not the best.
He preaches for the poor but lives the life of a rich man. He
speaks the language of delivery but his companies betray the very development he
has built his career on punting. Disintegration and delays stalk his corporate
interests.
He speaks the language of entrepreneurship while using his
influence to win contracts valued at over R150?million and counting.
Entrepreneurs roll up their sleeves and put their noses to the grindstone.
Malema sub-contracts work and runs a bare-bones operation that has
failed to submit returns and has not secured the tax clearance certificates
without which tenders should not have been granted. While real entrepreneurs
struggle to get a foot in the door and have to jump through regulatory hoops,
the politically connected youth leader is the consummate tenderpreneur – a word
he despises.
Malema is also the nation’s bully in chief. Since he became youth
league president Malema has scarred the body politic, taking on everyone from
bankers to opposition politicians, activists and his own allies in the unions
and the communist party, insulting all in base language that holds no content
but only contempt.
It is the way of the bully and if he is not stopped it will be the
way of the demagogue politician who insults anyone who stands up to him while
cultivating constituencies among the most vulnerable. Look at how he speaks
only to students and the old to see how he can accept only adulation, never
debate or difference.
This week he turned his guns on the media, releasing a four- page
document on City Press’s Dumisane Lubisi alleging corruption and exposing all
of the journalist’s most private details, including his address, his children’s
identity numbers and his wife’s business interests.
It is a mish-mash of fabrication, hyperbole and nonsense mixed in
with factual detail like identity numbers, bank accounts and telephone details.
It bears the hallmark of state dirty tricks we have seen in the
hoax email saga deployed in the fight between former president Thabo Mbeki and
now President Zuma.
Other journalists have been maligned as unprofessional liars and
loose women who sleep around for stories.
This is dirty tricks against the media which has exposed his
substandard business practices, his tax-dodging ways and the million and one
ways in which Malema is no Mandela.