Should South Africa be scared of Julius Malema?

SOUTH AFRICA'S leading Sunday newspapers devoted their front pages this week to reviling one of the country's most influential and divisive politicians, Julius Malema, who leads the ruling ANC's youth league ­ - a position once occupied by a fiery young Nelson Mandela.

Thirty-year-old Malema was called "two-faced" in one headline and accused of profiting from a web of business interests relating to the awarding of millions of rands worth of government tenders.

Another front page article, headlined 'Malema on the ropes', ran accusations by ministers that his youth league was out of control and was usurping the policy-making prerogatives of national government.

A third lead story focused on a thinly veiled swipe at Malema by Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who accused young leaders of "spitting in the faces" of those who had sacrificed their lives for freedom.

However, a bare narration of the charges levelled against Malema fails to account for the pages of newsprint that are regularly dedicated to him. After all, he is not the only ambitious politician allegedly on the make in South Africa today.

The newspapers here are full of stories of leaders living the high life at public expense. In this context, the R1.2 million spent on Malema's latest Range Rover, the R16 million allegedly earmarked to build a mansion for him in Johannesburg, and the bottles of champagne and scotch that he is reported to quaff in all-night drinking sessions don't really set him apart.

Indeed, graft in the form of government contracts allocated to friends and family has become so common that a new term has been coined to describe its beneficiaries: "tenderpreneurs".

The distinguishing factor that has elevated Malema to a realm of notoriety where only South African President Jacob Zuma among active politicians rivals him in terms of name recognition has been his loud adoption of unashamedly populist and nationalist positions in relation to issues of race and redistribution of wealth.

Malema rose to public prominence in June 2008, two months after being elected to the ANC Youth League's top post, when he strongly backed Jacob Zuma's bid to become president of South Africa in the wake of Thabo Mbeki's loss of the leadership of the ruling party the year before.

Malema made headlines by declaring: "We are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma."

Adopting a self-consciously anti-intellectual persona, Malema quickly forged an image for himself as a "man of the people". However, unlike the presidential candidate who won the general election in 2009, the activist's rhetoric tended to the confrontational rather than the conciliatory ­ particularly on the issue of race, which, overtly and covertly, continues to pervade South African political and socio-economic life in the post-apartheid era.

The youth leader often uses race to defend his interests - ­ particularly his economic ones. Malema was born in 1981 into a poverty-stricken household in Masakeng ­ a township in Limpopo Province. His father was absent. His mother, Flora, was a domestic worker.

He says "my family was the poorest of the poor" and describes going to school without shoes and not knowing where his next meal would come from. He became obsessed with politics early on, and was a member of the ANC Youth League by the age of 14.

He sees his rise to power within the context of a society where the division between the haves and have-nots continues to be defined largely by race: "We are the elite that has been deliberately produced by the ANC as part of its policy to close the gap between whites and blacks in this country."

Malema extends the logic to broader economic issues, in particular the continuing vexed question of land ownership in South Africa, where white people, who constitute about 10 per cent of the population, continue to own more than 80 per cent of arable land, based on historical dispossession of blacks.

Malema has called for the present "willing buyer, willing seller" model of land appropriation to be abandoned in favour of a new policy: "We must take the land without payment." Similarly, Malema has urged the nationalisation of South Africa's mines, upon which the country's industrial revolution was founded.

The nationalisation call, which runs contrary to present government policy, has seen Malema portrayed as a 'leftist' by many media commentators here. However, the proposal perhaps more accurately should be seen as reflecting a nationalist outlook, consistent with recently espoused foreign policy positions adopted by the youth league.

Malema visited Zimbabwe last year, offering the league's political support to autocratic president Robert Mugabe. More recently, Malema expressed support for "forces" in Botswana to unseat that country's ruling party, led by President Ian Khama, arguing that the regime is too close to America. The impetus is to back African governments and parties that are opposed to Western influence.

In all this, Malema is often seen as giving a voice to the millions of black South Africans who remain desperately poor and feel cheated 17 years after the introduction of multi-racial democracy in 1994, and as the country remains, in terms of standards of living, the most unequal society in the world.

For others, in particular the white minority, Malema is a bogeyman ­ - the potential leader of a future in which they have no place.

These fears were exacerbated after Malema was taken to court for - and banned from - publicly singing an old anti-apartheid struggle song which exclaimed dubula ibhunu, meaning 'shoot the boer' (white Afrikaners).

The only two books that have so far been written about him were penned by white journalists. The introduction to the first ­- a slim volume entitled The World According to Julius Malema by Max du Preez and Mandy Rossuow - ­ reflects on how he is loathed and ridiculed by most white South Africans. Many middle-class black people, including leading newspaper editors, are also critical of his antics.

Malema himself seeks to place his role within a long tradition of militant youth league leaders: "Nelson Mandela... did not teach us to be afraid of anybody." However, this version of history omits to mention the calibre of, for example, the founders of the youth league, including Mandela and Oliver Tambo, who were graduates of Fort Hare university, and subsequent youth leaders such as Sussex University alumnus Thabo Mbeki. Malema, by contrast, barely scraped through high school.

The rewriting of the past further ignores the momentous nature of the struggle against apartheid in which these leaders were engaged, and sidesteps accusations made against Malema that his mission is really no more than that of many other agents of South Africa's present black economic empowerment: to get rich quick.

It remains to be seen whether the arriviste will last. Some have predicted at least a future ministerial role and even a presidential one. But other analysts wonder whether 30-year-old Malema will be able to cope politically once the semi-detached freedom of a youth leader has been curtailed ­ - the league has an age limit of 35 - ­ and he has to buckle down to the everyday work of deals and compromise to which grown-up politicians are subjected.

It is a burden that Malema has so far studiously avoided ­ - he turned down a seat in parliament in 2009 and repeatedly insists that his status is no more than that of a "private person". But, as Tutu declared in the same speech this past weekend in which he castigated "young leaders": "Freedom is not a licence to be irresponsible." ·