UNDERSTANDING THE JULIUS MALEMA PHENOMENON: A SOUTH AFRICAN NECESSITY

In one of his seminal speeches Martin Luther King Jnr warns society that “in the end, we will remember not the words (or noises) of our enemies, but the silences of our friends”. The ascendance of Mr Julius Malema to what is arguably the most powerful position to be held by a young adult in South Africa has attracted noises and silences that only history will tell of their animosity or friendliness. In whatever manner the answer turns out to be, Mr Malema has entrenched himself as both a legitimate leader of a sizeable section of South Africa’s youth and a political phenomenon available for intellectual inquest. As a youth leader Mr Malema represented the biggest organised youth constituency in the developing world. According to the ANCYL conference attendance procedures, every delegate that graced the conference in a representative capacity commanded 50 registered members of the Youth League. The conference has been reported to have had 5300 delegates; this translates to 265 000 members. Assuming that each registered member represents 10 additional supporters to the ANCYL course the number balloons to 2 650 000 supporters; added to this number would be those youth-age members of the ANC who are ‘silent friends’ only waiting to make their informed noise during the country’s elections. The sum total of these youth groups computes to a sizeable and rather vocal part of the official South African population that has ‘some’ voice in Malema. Whilst the numerical justification, audited in ANCYL terms, of Malema’ s legitimacy as a confirmed youth and South African leader that will not require 27 years imprisonment or exile for society to either agree or disagree with what his generation stands for; it is in the phenomenon he has become that an intellectual inquest is required. A phenomenon is broadly defined to include attitudes and events particular to a group that may have effects beyond the group, and either is adapted by the larger society, or seen as aberrant, being punished or shunned. The character and form of Malema’s leadership of the ANCYL has, and in many respects, been representative of what a phenomenon is or can be. In his short span as a national youth leader he displayed attitudes and engaged himself in events and activities that will impact beyond his generation. He has grown to become an obligatory footnote in the story of his generation. The challenge that he, or what he maybe representing, needs to manage is that of dealing with a society that has chosen to view his activities as ignorable or political blasphemous. South Africa’s social ordering and information manufacturing environment has relegated, consciously or otherwise, the ‘phenomena’ in Malema to an in-party political leadership contestation matter. The striking feature about his ‘contribution’ in the texturing of the South African landscape is that he seems to represent the single most subject of consensus by the country’s media and the ruling ANC. Compounding this uncharacteristic consensus, is the degree to which the ‘in- and outside-ANC establishments’ coalesce around the need to remove his representative being from the discourse political. In Malema, the ANC, the Media and ‘the establishment’ seems to have found the magic ground of convergence never experienced, in proportion terms since the Polokwane 52nd Conference of the ANC. Post-Malema political landscape of South Africa inherits in this ‘consensus’ a youth constituency that may have to generate an outlet for what has otherwise been true in the content of Malema’s rants. This unfortunate social ordering of South Africa that has the sub-context of race as a primary vector of analysis and minority ‘rights’ as secondary lenses for observing any emergent phenomena has once again denied society an opportunity to honestly interact with what the Malema-ANCYL represents or ‘represented’ for this country’s future. Two ANCYL elective conferences gave Malema a ‘mandate’ to be what he was or became. In our attitudes towards the Malema mandate we are either adopting a posture of seeing it as aberrant or are planning to shun it because it foregrounds the inconvenient part of our national self; race visible inequalities. In this inconvenience that seems to suffer from an absence of a ‘national movement’ driven strategy, the ANC emerges as the only conduit for dealing with the Malema ‘aberrance’ whilst maintaining an ‘outside-ANC’ freedom of expression posture. The collateral damage for the ANC will be the collapse of its closely guarded treasure of keeping a liberation movement character whilst being the ruling party. The leadership breeding implications of the in-ANC reaction of the Malema phenomenon will go a long way into defining the character of a post-liberation movement leadership of the ANC. The ‘class co-option’ or ‘class volunteering’ of the post 1994 ANC leadership, like any post liberation movement, will surely redefine the ideological texture of ANC-ness as a critical foundation of the emerging South Africaness. The ascendant ‘class conflicts’ of interests as manifest in the juniorisation of in-ANC policy making processes is a clear indication of the shifting ideological basis for being ANC. The only constant in this change is the absence of an alternative ideological posture to the vague ‘all who live in it’ mantra that has thus far built the ‘civil society’ conglomerate called the ‘ANC-led liberation movement’. The 1994 democratic breakthrough elevated to prominence a then ‘subjugated’ and recent times ‘new’ breed of South African leadership; pyramidal to it was Nelson Mandela. This cohort of leaders was fortunately socialised as young men and women by an education system that taught them about the equality of humanity, whence their resolve ‘freedom in our life time’. This group of leaders continue to decorate the annals of South African history for reasons that vary from hero to villain depending on the choice you make when reading about all of them. The ability of the Mandela cohort to embrace reconciliation was both a function of statesmanship, adulthood and predisposition to a set class structure, parts of which its foundations were built prior to the institutionalisation of Apartheid. It may be argued that judging Malema on those standards may be unfair to what has socialised him, notwithstanding the truth about some within his cohort who display a different attitude than the one he has become to be known for. Infused into the pre-Malema cohort of ANC leaders and elders is a mixture of the 1976 generation of leaders, many of whom were graduates of the systemic oppressor education environment, that entrenched in them a particular respect for ‘authority’ irrespective of what legitimises such an authority. In effect this cohort of leaders could easily be ‘bought’ and ‘co-opted’ into the mainstream class structure created by the ‘multi-racial’ Mandela Cohort. In these generations of leaders you would find men and women who only understood, and in many respects experienced, discrimination that is often mistaken to be racism. The post-1994 Mandela class integration, on the back of a narrowly defined reconciliation platform, that was mistaken to be a non-racialising assignment created within this adult cohort of leaders a sense of acceptance by other race groups to an extent that to some it signified an arrival at the elusive ‘non-racial’ destination of South Africa. The Malema generation of youth followers is in the main composed of what is today being referred to as ‘born-frees’. This is a group of youth that was born from 1985 and they experienced mixed race education as well as ‘open and yet unavailable opportunities’. To this generation ‘freedom’ is who they are and ‘integrated societies’ is what they have become. They are a generation that has an experience of what it means to be good at something and yet not be allowed to excel because of who you are in class and race terms. They are a generation that was thrust into global competitiveness without any adequate preparation by their history, circumstances or choices. They are not only born free of Apartheid but also ‘free’ of the organisational discipline of being ANC unless they individually took an effort to understand the ANC that was transitioning from a ‘condition of illegality to a ruling party’. Julius Malema himself has consistently been presented as the epitome of this generation. The overemphasis on his matric scores and social background as well as a growing preference by mainstream media to foreground second language articulate African Kids created a definite us and them that was class defined. The continued and subtle racism that is experienced by African kids in Model C and private schools has created amongst the ‘hope class’ a literate and yet angry group of young black kids that are only interested in the quality of the education provided but not the value system it purports to be striving towards. The ‘coconuts’ are gradually becoming ‘black inside’ as a result of the growing cultural awareness that is propelled by emergent African leadership from mainstream thought ‘discounted’ communities like the one Malema comes from. The general discontent of this generation has found resonance in the slogan ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’. Emulating the 1949 and 1976 generations when they declared war of the prevailing social system, this generation identifies, and potentially with the assistance of the global economic crisis, the economy as a site for a ‘new’ struggle. The extent to which the issues raised are empirical to qualify the emergence of a call to action by this generation has now become a political discourse of our lifetime; the ANC now has a discussion document on these issues. The absence of an ‘ideologically defined’ economic stance by the ruling ANC confirms Nkrumah’s assertion that an ideology that comes to characterise society should be a function of a successfully ended revolution. The continued reference to the National Democratic Revolution in ANC policy chronicles indicates an ‘incomplete revolution’ thus affirming Nkrumah. In its quest to define an end state of the ‘revolution’ the Malema generation created for itself the ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’ trajectory within which they can define a programme. The organic nature of the slogan and its relevance to prevailing South African socio economic conditions provides currency to the transacting political environment. The mere existence of the slogan attracts solutions to this generation in a manner any organism becomes adaptable in the absence of defined rules of engagement, whence the attraction to what has arguably failed elsewhere but never tested in the current global environment dominated by developing economy paradigms of socio-economic planning. In fact, the current crisis of global capitalism can be a major catalyst to the ‘economic freedom in our lifetime movement’ and its alternatives. As a youth formation the ANCYL represents therefore an organised obligation to implement what defines them for an agreed term. The ANCYL conference resolutions on the economic future of South Africa have now become a template within which the country’s ‘either or’ discourse is measured. Society has a responsibility to ‘convince’ the Malema generation of the correctness, incorrectness or otherwise of their positions on the commanding heights of this economy. The obsession with palace politics with the hope that in-ANC leadership contests will through some magic want resolve the vexing questions of economic transformation will only serve to create ‘intellectually gated communities’ with comforts that are alien to discourse creators such as the Malema generation. The subjugation of pro-poor economic debates in order to avoid discussing the ‘true structure’ of the South African economy in terms of ownership patterns can only serve to create a new economic theory by the majority on how to balance the glaring imbalances. In the absence of a defined course of thought and debate, constituencies within a society default at stressing their own and obligatory ranges of conduct. Instruments to guarantee conformity to such conducts include amongst others coercion and cohesion, prohibitions and permissions, inclusion and exclusion, as well as labelling and popularisation. The ANC as the nexus of political life in South Africa is therefore obliged to confront all manner of debates that were raised at the ANCYL conference. The intellectual fortitude of the movement is once again challenged, the mere reduction of the emerging economic debate as political grand standing by the youth will confirm a concretising view that the ANC is experiencing intellectual dearth. The compartmentalisation of platforms of engagement on the basis of an undefined ideological framework is fast juniorising the moral high ground the ANC has earned through struggle. The struggle history space is being redefined to include anyone that fought Apartheid to be a potential icon deserving of national honours irrespective of current party and/or ideological affiliation. The centenary redefinition opportunities presented by the 2012 policy and electoral conferences should be ‘exploited’ to redirect the budding youth energy in South Africa. Dr FM Lucky Mathebula Research Associate Tshwane University of Technology and Chairperson: Th!nk