MALEMA's scandal

                                            Malema's day of humiliation

EFF leader Julius Malema is a master at media manipulation, and the lead-up to the “national shutdown” generated huge attention for a small party. But when the day of reckoning came, Malema and his party suffered complete humiliation.

For their “national shutdown” to be successful, the EFF would have needed to mobilise tens of thousands of people in the major cities. Instead, there were only small protests, pathetically small protests. Even in their main event, the march in Pretoria led by Malema, they could, according to media reports, after a very slow start, only draw a medium-sized crowd.

The gap between Malema’s hubris, he was even speaking of a revolution in the days before the protests, and reality was vast. He is now exposed as a politician who is very good at winning media attention, mediocre at winning votes and completely inept at organising real support on the ground. 

But the damage done to Malema and his party was not only due to the failure to mobilise on any sort of scale. The image of Malema and Carl Niehaus walking hand-in-hand in the Pretoria march would have been sickening to most South Africans. 

Malema, who once said he was willing to kill for Zuma but then turned on Zuma when it was expedient for him to do so, is now openly allied with the self-described “Radical Economic Transformation” (RET) faction of the ANC. Niehaus is one of the most nauseating figures in South African politics and Malema’s reputation, already battered by the EFF’s own corruption scandals, will now be in tatters. 

Most South Africans have a deep loathing of corruption. The attempts by the Zuma faction of the ANC and its hangers-on – like the now defunct Black First Land First – to spin massive state looting as “revolutionary”, cut no ice with the vast majority of South Africans. Malema has done himself serious, and quite probably permanent damage, by associating with the likes of Niehaus. 

Malema will remain a player in our politics because the media always amplifies his relevance, and because the decline in the support for the ANC will mean that small parties can negotiate real power for themselves in coalition arrangements, and he is a canny operator. 

But we now know for sure that Malema has no right at all to claim that he speaks for anything other than a small minority of South Africans, and that he has no capacity to mobilise on the streets at any meaningful scale.