A PLAYER ON OUR STAGE

THE SUNDAY TIMES
JOHANNESBURG, SA
By Barry Ronge
Mar 22, 2009

Whether you love or loathe Julius Malema, he certainly knows how to keep himself in the public eye

Whether you await the forthcoming election with elation, indifference or apprehension, it is producing any number of highly diverting sideshows. Where else in the world could the cardiac health of a man who holds no senior office and is not a political candidate in the election, and is — technically — still serving a prison term, hold the media’s attention in such thrall?

Schabir Shaik has variously been described as “a dead man walking” and “fit enough to return to prison”, and for the two weeks prior to writing this column, I have heard, or read, a daily editorial comment or a spluttering denunciation of each of those assessments of the man’s state.

It seems to me that it could quite easily be resolved. Let the three main parties contesting this election each nominate — after a thorough background check, of course — a doctor of their choice, and instruct them to conduct a thorough medical check-up of Shaik.

Each practitioner would then release his or her report to all three parties and also to the media. If they are all in agreement on the subject’s state of health, the issue goes away. If not, someone will have to answer for it and while that may not exactly make it a case of QED or RIP, it is certainly LMO (Let’s Move On).

But that’s never going to happen. Shaik has become the overworked stick with which everyone is beating everyone else. As long as there is doubt about his state of health, opposition politicians can keep asking questions and use it to pull the arms deal back onto the table , of course, allowing for numerous reminders of the still unresolved legal matters involving Jacob Zuma.

The state of poor old Mr Shaik’s health is not really the issue. Metaphorically speaking, he’s a ticking time-bomb and everyone is hoping it will explode in their rival’s back yard.

The same goes for Julius Malema. That very shrewd analyst and commentator, Chris Moerdyk, wrote a wonderfully incisive piece on Malema that began with these words: “I am tossing a particularly wild feline into a very precious coop of pigeons by suggesting that Julius Malema is not an idiot but a pretty darn good marketer.”

Now that’s brilliant insight. I had my own theory on Malema. Most people consider him to be what Vladimir Lenin called “a useful idiot”, a phrase the Russian used to describe affluent middle class, leftish Communist sympathisers and “armchair revolutionaries” who wore designer garments to workers’ rallies and had their bankers send off their donations to “the cause”.

I don’t think that shoe fits. I have hitherto seen him more as a stalking horse or a bellwether, an entity who is deployed into a situation, who makes a big entrance and creates a big noise, so that his political masters can assess the response he provokes and analyse what it means and how they can use it.

When he stepped out of line with his words about Naledi Pandor, we saw, for the first time, just how fast the ANC pulled him back and poured the oil of his grovelling apology on the troubled water.

After that incident, I noticed that he picked his public performances a little more carefully. When Radio 702’s Redi Direko invited the leaders of the youth leagues of all the political parties to an on-air debate, Malema was otherwise engaged. In his absence he took some gibes from his counterparts who claimed that he was too afraid to face them, but he had a slicker trick up his sleeve.

A week later, he did a show on his own, which immediately singled him out as something special. That’s just a masterly stroke of upstaging the competition. This man — or is it perhaps the people who run him? — certainly knows how to ensure that the media can find him. He’s the Paris Hilton of South African politics.

But Moerdyk added an even sharper observation. “One of the main facts supporting the ANC’s reluctance to rein Malema in, is that youngsters turned out in bigger than ever numbers during the recent IEC voter registration.

“More than a million additional young people in the 18 to 29 age bracket registered to vote, compared with only 300000 older folk. A total of six million youths under the age of 29 are now on the voters’ roll, versus four million in 2004. That’s a sizeable chunk of the country’s 23 million voters. Enough votes to make any political party sit up and take notice,” wrote Moerdyk, and that really is QED and OTM (On The Money).