INTERVIEW WITH JULIUS MALEMA

BY JANET SMITH

The following interviews took place on 25 January and 6 February 2014 at the EFF offices in Braamfontein, in the heartland of Joburg’s raucous young student community. The first interview took place on a Saturday morning, and Floyd Shivambu and my notetaking assistant, Lindi Magagula, joined Julius Malema and me. We sat in an empty boardroom in the otherwise unoccupied office wing. An unused display cabinet and a pile of EFF posters were the only other features in the room. That day we spoke for about five hours, almost non-stop. At the second interview, it was only Julius and I, sitting in the same room, but this time there was more activity outside, as EFF supporters waited in the lobby to talk to party organisers.

JS How important are the friendships that you made as a child to you now, and do those friends still belong in your circle?

JM Well, the many friends that I had as a child, I don’t think they are still in the circles, because we outgrew each other and developed different interests and I went from one place to the other and many of them remained in the township there, but when we meet, like in December and holidays, we reconnect very well and it is not like there was a gap between us. It’s very few of them that have joined the politics and they were with me throughout.

JS So in a sense these are ordinary people who are still in your life and still remain very important to your history and so on?

JM Yes, very, very important. They are still there, I think. There is a guy called Tlou Mosomane. It is one guy I grew up with, ja, and we grew up in a four-roomed house, and at his house they had a back room, so most of the time I was sleeping with him there at his place and I would eat at his place and all that.

JS This is as a teenager?

JM Ja. When I was young. And we are no longer that close, but when we meet, we don’t have to work out anything to understand each other. We just click and move forward.

JS Yes, and how do those people approach you now, Julius, I mean do they have a sense of distance?

JM He doesn’t care about those things, he just walks in, and sometimes those who are politically conscious and do not know him and all that, they want to push him … hey, you can’t talk to leadership like that, but I will come in and say, no, leave these guys. So we relate like that. He doesn’t have the barriers and want to treat me differently from how we treated each other a long time ago.

JS Okay, because I imagine that becomes quite difficult later on when you are a very well-known person – somehow there’s a different ambience around you. So at the moment, if you look at the people who really matter to you, who is in your inner circle?

JM Look, personally I think that if there are people that I would miss ordinarily in the busy schedule of my work, that would be my son and my grandmother. And just missing to have that short conversation and all that. And then politically, I think the EFF members and leadership have been around and we are consistently working together and there is no vacuum.

I mean, Floyd and I, we have moved from the ANC together and there we have developed that close relationship and we support one another. Maybe because of his assigned responsibilities, he’s forced to be closer to me and know and understand a lot of things about my personal life and political life and certain political utterances, and he can only appreciate them if they are taken both politically from a formal point of view and informally as we engage each other, so that he develops a better understanding as a spokesperson to understand what is the leader of the organisation speaking about when he says one, two, three.

JS Yes, absolutely.

JM Ja, and Ramakatsa, our national co-ordinator. We are forced to talk almost every day because he is the implementer, particularly of the administrative component of the organisation.

So we will time and again call each other to understand how far are we in terms of preparations of this or implementation of this or that. Ja, and we have to do the agenda of meetings together, we have to look at the minutes of the meetings together before they are sent back to the collective.

JS So just on that subject. Are you finding yourself drawn into a lot of stuff that later on will obviously be delegated to other people? I mean are you feeling like you almost have to micro-manage processes, see every speech, see all the minutes?

Are you that involved at the moment in all aspects of the organisation?

JM Yes, there is nothing that happens that I don’t know. Because for simple reasons that we are at the formative stage and you have to make sure that you are involved and do not create wrong first impressions which they will not give. Ordinarily, there is no second chance to correct those wrong first impressions, and being one of the founding leaders, I think I owe it to the formative stage [of the organisation] to be there and ensure that everything is run smoothly.

But also my experience of COSAS¹. When I became a president of COSAS, not only president, I mean the chairperson of COSAS in Limpopo, there was almost nothing, no branches of COSAS and all that, I had to revive it from the scratch and then I became its president. I had to revive it nationally and also give it a national character and that image.

And then the Youth League, when we inherited it in the province, and nationally, it had lesser branches, lesser membership. We actually trebled those branches and the membership and we had presence everywhere.

So I come into EFF with this: a lot of experience on building the organisation, many of those in the current collective do not have, and therefore I should see to them in each and every meeting, and help them by sharing that experience on how best can we take forward the building of the organisation.

JS Two questions emanate out of that. The first one is, you were very young when you were in those kinds of structures, and that is expected, because it was COSAS. At the same time what you’re describing is just a natural desire to be a person who is setting things up, creating a means for other people to, you know, gain political legitimacy and so on.

Are those natural skills of yours? Even when you were a child, did you find yourself organising people on the playground? I mean, that is a talent that not many people can have. It’s confidence, it’s other things.

JM Look, we were attracted to the movement at the age of nine or so and first we were attracted by the type of songs they sing and the energy they display when they sing these songs, so it was a bit exciting for a child. But their songs sounded more like the ZCC songs, which was the big church, you know, in Limpopo and with that type of energy.

JS And was it your church?

JM No, it was not my church, but it was the most dominant church, which all of us grew to celebrate and appreciate. And so we were joining them and they were chasing us away and all that, but I remained consistent, following them and all that, and those things of them being chased by police.

So when you are a child, it’s like a game, running around and all that, and some of them then recognised my insistence on following them and they started recognising me when I was round them.

Part of which I would be assigned a task of organising the young kids with the tyres and then we pushed the tyres, as if we were playing and we advance for the protesters, so, we’ll arrive, they will tell us, when you arrive at that corner, that shop, you must leave those tyres there and go home and we will put them there.

Obvious we didn’t go. We wanted to see what was going to happen. So they came, burned them and barricaded the roads and all that. The police shot and we start running around and all those things.

So we started running around, police started shooting and all those things, and we would also be assigned the responsibility of taking out the rubbish bins. We had these hard plastic rubbish bins, so we put water inside and then helped each other to take them out of the houses into the streets.

So there would be water inside those rubbish bins, for teargas, so when they run, they take out their shirts and dip it inside the water and put it on the nose and all those things. Ja, so, and then there was a guy who came from MK, called Freddie Ramaphakela, who then started organising us as Young Pioneers and then started teaching us songs, started teaching us poems.

I was telling Floyd yesterday that I used to know those poems of Mzwakhe [Mbuli], I don’t know them anymore now. And I thought it was very revolutionary to imitate how Nelson Mandela speaks, because we used to do those things, and ja, he then started training us and then we were told one day that we were going to exile and all that.

JS At what age was that?

JM Almost ten, eleven, twelve.

JS So, this is not, if you have to think about your son, this is not necessarily a life that you would like him to lead at eleven?

JM No, no. That was really abusive actually to hear a story that when we were thinking of going to exile, people were already here or were coming back here. It becomes a joke. What were we going to do in exile when people are coming home? But we only got exposure to that information now, that, during those years when we thought we could go to exile, people were coming home. But the older guys from our unit left and then only to discover later that they went to the camps in Venda where they were given some training. They even came back with certificates.

When we’re supposed to cross, we stayed home for almost four days without going to school, so we couldn’t tell the school authorities where we were going and our parents and all that.

We would go like we were going to school and take a detour. And after the fourth day, I said, ag, look I’m going back to school, and the other guys refused to go back, because we were going to be sjambokked, and it was going to lead to a confession.

JS You were going to be sjambokked at school?

JM Yes, for being absent for those days. So I went, I was beaten, I was actually told to push a big tree and, as you’re pushing it, they beat you at the back.

JS How old were you at this point?

JM I was very young, I mean I was eleven, twelve, but I didn’t retreat, I didn’t surrender the information I said, and they were beating us.

They asked, why didn’t you come to school for four days, and all that. And that guy, after beating me, I changed that school unannounced. I just left. I said I am no longer at that school. Then I went to a nearby school and that other school they received me because there were very few kids from my section.

My section was known for crime and was known for people who don’t want to go to school and all that. So, the teachers there celebrated the fact that I come from that area and I came to school so, but I didn’t tell my mother. I just went on my own. Because that guy, the way he sjambokked me.

So I was very angry. I was doing standard three.

So I left, I went to another school there. That school, the difference was that the one I went to, we’re wearing long pants. In the other one we’re wearing short pants, and I didn’t have short pants, so I was wearing long because they said I must tell my mother to buy me the short pants.

So she was going to pick up an issue that I left the other school without telling her, so I went and cut the long pants and made them shorts on my own and I went to that school and that’s where I went and attended my primary, my higher primary.

So what happened is that we continued with the political involvement and what pained me the most was that those guys that refused to go to school, they are still there in the township, they have never gone back, and they are now, you know, struggling, and all that.

The organisation itself [ANC] doesn’t take care for them or anything like that.

So I became permanently involved with the movement, the planning of the strikes, of the high schools. I actually hated my high school principal even before I met him because of the things that used to be said about him in the meetings of COSAS and the Young Pioneers’ meetings.

The universities, they were protesting … The University of the North, we stayed almost 50/60km away from the university, but we would meet with the students of the university in town and listen to their complaints, planning of those protests, writing of the posters with marking pens for those strikes there.

So, when I went to the high school, it didn’t become a difficult issue. When I first started standard six, I was already involved in the SRC and the structures there because throughout I have been involved.

And you know, the SRC that we went to at standard six, we were actually asked to write the constitution, because there was no SRC². They were not recognised, so we did a strike. We were led by one guy. He is no more now. A very intelligent young person.

So they said we must write the constitution. I was given an assignment to write the constitution. So I went to fetch the constitution of COSAS and wrote it. You know, copied it by hand and, where they say COSAS, I write SRC and all that, and the structure of COSAS became the structure of our first SRC.

And then COSAS had ex-officios from provinces, chairperson and the secretary, so I said the class representatives would then be ex-officio members of the SRC, so I don’t know where I went wrong.

I wrote in that handwritten one [constitution], I wrote COSAS somewhere where I was supposed to replace it with the SRC and that man said, hey, you can’t bring the COSAS constitution here, and all that. So, that’s how we got exposed.

That was where the serious direct leadership participation started because we took students into protests and demanded several things, part of which was the resignation of the principal.

JS Did you achieve that?

JM We did. Because of his historical background. There was a year where we had the longest strike. I can’t remember the year, where we had a strike actually from February until beyond June. Even half-yearly exams were not written and all those things because we were forcing this man to resign.

My township had seven high schools … We went to collect all the students to come and attend our school so you can imagine the numbers which were there and all that.

So the Department closed the school and then the man later resigned. He had a very bad attitude.

JS Towards the children?

JM Ja.

JS So it was less a political act than being about the abusive treatment of the children?

JM Ja, he didn’t have politics. First he had this policy, which now everyone practises, that if you fail twice, you won’t come back, and then most of the kids were actually drop-outs because of that policy, because once he expels you, we were calling it DCB: Don’t Come Back.

Once he expels you, the schools around won’t accept you and the only schools that will accept you were the schools in the rural areas which were costly, because you have to travel by bus every morning, and we thought this was not going to work.

Actually he was helping in the reproduction of criminals and useless elements in the township, and we were fighting against such a policy.

It was not helping in fighting poverty and producing people with qualifications who could later help their families.

JS Why were children failing like that, because it must have been a very seriously under-resourced situation in order for them to be failing on that scale?

JM Look, the kids were coming from, first, poverty-stricken families and most of them would have to play both the role of a parent and that of a student.

You do not have any necessary means to reinforce your understanding of what you have been taught at school. You have illiterate parents who can’t help you with homework. But during the day, there’s no time to do homework.

You must perform certain duties at home and then in the evening, when you have an opportunity to do so, there is no electricity. You must light a candle, but only for very few minutes because now they are going to be coming on you, the parents, saying you need to switch off the candle to save it for tomorrow.

When you arrive at school, you must then deliver the homework you were assigned, so the conditions generally were not conducive for proper learning, and then there was the quality as well of teachers.

You know, I listen to most of you journalists criticising our self-taught English for instance, because we had English teachers who couldn’t express themselves.

We spoke vernac during English period and you are still expected to perform. The same goes for Afrikaans, and the same goes for Mathematics, and any other subject which must be taught in English.

You are engaged in vernac and, when the exam comes, there is no time to, you know, interpret.

JS And what was your English like at that stage, Julius? If you have to look back on yourself, what was it like to have a 10-year-old Julius Malema in your class, as a teacher?

JM Look, we speak the English we learnt in the ANC when we were very young. We were even using very big words that we come across when leaders reflected on political issues, and ordinarily the comrades, when they are together, they never express themselves in vernac, they speak English.

And that’s how we came to appreciate it. Then we continued to polish it as we went along because we got exposed to more concepts.

And then, I think as a 10-year-old, I was involved, but I never showed that in class, so it was not very problematic for those who taught me at lower primary. Ours was divided into two, it was lower primary and higher primary.

So there was no early sign of a problematic child. And from lower primary school until I went to high school, I never failed a grade, because we were focused on school and we were not supposed to show any sign of involvement in the political activities because schools were also centres of intelligence for the apartheid regime.

So we had to conduct ourselves in a manner that they will not pick it up that we were involved.

JS And this was obviously until you got to the point with COSAS where it was almost entirely activism? You had to be fearless?

JM COSAS, yes, we assumed responsibility. We were leading openly and all that.

I remember one day we took a very stupid decision when we had a strike and police arrested students, so we had to go and hand ourselves over to the police, because we said we can’t allow the students to be arrested and the leaders who organised the protest are not arrested.

So those comrades said, no, we must go home and collect our toiletry bags for prison.

Ah, I was shocked – what was a toiletry bag? Because I didn’t have those things. So they went to collect the wash rag and the toothpaste and then we walked to the police station and ja, we’re assaulted, beaten by those police. It was like that.

JS As young as you were?

JM Yes, because they released those other innocent kids and then we were locked in for a weekend. Ja, so it was the type of life we lived when we were in COSAS, but before that there was absolutely nothing.

JS But you could relate, for example, to the events that played out in January this year, when six-year-old Michael Komape died in a pit latrine. This happened in a village close to Seshego, Limpopo, where you grew up, yet that kind of childhood still exists there now in 2014 and there’s another seven years that Government has got out of the new regulations to fix those pit latrines.

It is not even within three as the Department of Education’s norms and standards state. It’s another seven.

So this must be very disheartening for a child of that area.

JM That’s very, very, very bad and that is a very good example of what our young kids are still, you know, exposed to. They have to travel, young as they are, some kilos to go to a school. They haven’t been exposed to a pit toilet.

The reason why he fell into a pit toilet is because at home he doesn’t go to a pit toilet. He helps himself in an open veld and then they come clean after. So at school, strict as they are, the teachers will for sure say, all of you, there is the toilet, and they just have to get on with it.

You know, he doesn’t have that experience and there is no mechanism in place to look after them in-between the class and going to help themselves.

So, it is a harsh reality that our kids are growing under and no one is there to provide, you know, that type of care, so that we could produce a less angry society.

This anger will never go away because when they come to realise the truth, actually there’re kids their age not very far from them, who are living much better than them, they start asking themselves, what’s wrong with us, what is it we have done to deserve to grow up under this environment?

And there is nothing wrong with them. The system is just not taking care of its own people, because we have got a self-serving leadership which has neglected the poor and it is even worse, it’s worse than apartheid because it’s done by a black person.

You know when it is done by whites we understand that. They grew up under the impression that they are superior and therefore they are entitled to all privileges and they must oppress us and all that.

They were taught at school, but we were taught both at home and at school to look after each other as Africans, and when an African brother oppresses a fellow African brother, it becomes more painful than when it is done by a white person.

So, why do you continue to draw a salary as a councillor, as an MEC³, if you can’t help the school in the area which pays your salary to have better toilet facilities?

JS So what is the answer to that question?

JM The answer is that we must take the initiative. Imagine if all councillors were approaching Pick n Pay, were approaching Shoprite, were taking the initiative of community contributions to build first for ourselves facilities that would make learning conducive for our learners.

It shouldn’t always be the state. We have to take a responsibility, especially after acknowledging that we’ve got a government that doesn’t care about us.

So let’s look after each other. Let’s go take a loan, let’s go and get ourselves into debt, use the salary of a councillor as a surety at his house, whatever, to develop, you know, the school as an example. So we can do it, but the greediness and the type of morals we have introduced for political leadership is extreme, it is all about themselves and their families.

By doing that we are going to put pressure on this government to want to turn things around. This leadership has lost its legitimacy and credibility. It has lost morals and doesn’t care about the poorest of the poor.

So, I think in honouring the boy who died in the pit latrine, we should make a call for our people to start taking it upon themselves to create a conducive environment for learning in order to avoid reproducing a permanently angry society, which is self-hating and can get into very violent activities at any time because they don’t value life.

The problem with me is that you can’t explain Julius, the 10-year-old, or Julius Malema, without politics because there is no such a thing. I have never had that childhood life.

I tried these things of football and all that, but I was not playing. My role in the playing of football in the dusty fields and streets, and with the people who were betting money in the two teams, with the winner taking the money, was to be the one who holds the money for the two teams.

So I used to go and watch them and hold all the monies. They used to fight a lot, those people, because they would protest that, no, the referee is bought and all those things. So, there was one game, the last time I went and developed even less of an interest in those things of football. There was a very heated game and the betting amount was very high.

JS How high?

JM R100, R100, R200. Whoever wins takes.

Each team comes with R100, the other comes with R100, they bet. Whoever wins takes R200. So that meant a lot of beers after games. So, the R200, I was holding that and the losing team started causing problems and they wanted to come and take their money and I refused that money.

I said, no, they must finish the game, and I was beaten with a warm klap and I released the full amount of money. That was the last time I went to a game of football. I said no.

JS No wonder you lost interest.

JM I don’t want to play football or see myself anywhere close to those types of players. Then I concentrated on politics.

JS I was mentioning to Floyd that last week the Saturday Star, on their media page where they give out an award every week to the best and worst in the week, gave an orchid to the EFF for the re-branding of Julius.

But we know in the beginning there was a campaign against you, so this issue of woodwork and you failing it became an enormous joke. It became a legend. Did that hurt you in any way?

Could you see what was going on? And yet did it still hurt to be portrayed as a buffoon who is incapable of actually doing anything meaningful, who doesn’t have the skills that especially white people expect others to have?

JM Look, every individual has got that spot in life which people looking for negativity will pick up, and they use that to want to derail you or ridicule you, and we were taught that at a very, very, very early age.

I never listen to a destructive criticism, because its aim is not to build, but to destroy and you need to know that there will always be positive and negative. And you can’t use woodwork to get to me.

They have tried it, they published all those results in the papers, in the media, in the social media with the aim to demoralise me and defocus me from the struggle we were waging in the ANC and, you know, the Youth League. It’s an apartheid tactic, to take confidential documents about individuals and spread them because you want to discredit them.

They did that with all our leaders and so I look at them and say, these ones are taking chances because they don’t know me. They are actually reading about me without knowing the actual Julius Malema.

When we took woodwork as a subject in school, it was mainly for political reasons, because woodwork had the longest periods. It used to have three periods following each other, so within that three periods, we don’t attend those things of woodwork. We leave either the school to go and do political work or we used that period to do political work at school and it’s not only in Matric.

I’ve never done or passed those things of woodwork. I’ve never done woodwork. It was a subject to give me an opportunity to do my work, because it had longer periods. So in Matric, I didn’t write woodwork, I went in to sign the attendance register because you couldn’t write absent, so this is what I did, I went in, I signed that thing and left and then you can’t leave before one hour, so I stayed there for one hour. After one hour, I left.

So, hey, Julius Malema failed woodwork, woodwork that I have not written. The second point is that when I was writing Matric, I was president of COSAS. I left my school to go to Johannesburg. So I stayed here fulltime during my Matric year.

JS And this was for political reasons?

JM Ja, I came here. As a president you have to be full time in the office, so I worked there in Shell House. I stayed first here in Fontana and then I went to that big building there, Ponte. Then I left Ponte and I went to stay in Fordsburg.

Fordsburg was much better. Because now the ANC was giving us some allowance so I could afford a much cleaner and a better place. So I registered with a school called Prudence, in Soweto … Tladi. So when I get time I must go and do some work, school work and all that, which became practically impossible.

So I went to write Matric without having sat in a class of Matric and I passed, and there are kids who went to write Matric who were in class with a teacher in front of them the whole year, and they failed.

So, I had to take time during Matric exams to go and read on my own without any help of anybody.

JS While all of the other stuff was going on in your life?

JM So I was doing political work and all that, which is wrong. No one should emulate that type of example.

I think we should have been told even then and emphasis should have been made that we must concentrate on our education because it is this education which will make us a better people, you know.

And then from there, I registered for a youth diploma which I finished in rocket time, I am now almost completing a second qualification, a degree, so, and ja, for me, you use woodwork because, politically, there is nothing you can use against Malema.

You can’t fault him on his political articulations and what he represented, and that’s why you degenerate to look at such, you know, weaker spots in a person’s life in order to discredit him, and you do that for political reasons.

We joke a lot about it, even amongst ourselves. Mbalula used to bring it all the time when I defeat him on any IQ matter and there are people who are sitting and they will go, like, what happened … that thing of woodwork at school.

Ja, well with the hope, you know, of an intention to divert me from an engagement we are having, so ja, it is not a big issue.

JS You must have been perhaps a little bit shocked at the level of vitriol and in fact hatred that was directed at you. A person whom white South Africans didn’t know. It was intense.

There might have been a period of a few months when you started to establish yourself as the ANC Youth League leader before it happened, but I think almost from the time you were, it was dark.

What on earth went on that you so quickly became that figure of fear?

JM There was nothing, nothing at all which was done. Nothing.

I knew that the struggle for economic emancipation is the thing that our leaders have avoided because of its difficulty. It is not an easy thing, you know, to conduct. So I was not sure.

I was not a new role player in the national politics. I was a president of COSAS. I had a huge impact when I was a president of COSAS. I was a Youth League secretary, a recognisable individual in Limpopo even when I walked the streets.

Actually it started when I was leading in high school, when I walked the streets of my township, the people would call their grannies and all that to show them Julius Malema, so I was never overwhelmed.

I grew up with such, you know, attention, and when I got attacked, I knew that it was going to happen, it was bound to happen, and I was very happy that it was happening because it means that I’ve hit at the right spot.

I have reached them. They are now listening.

For me it achieved the whole objective, and woodwork, one two three, you don’t focus on that. Insist on putting the agenda for economic struggle on the table. They try to distract you and I have successfully done that myself in the ANC …

There is a huge debate today about how the black people continue to be marginalised, how the black people continue to be oppressed, excluded from the mainstream economic activities.

A struggle which many had forgotten and people were beginning to be comfortable and accepting the mediocre that we were exposed to, RDP houses, clapping of hands, water with a tap that doesn’t have water, clapping hands, and beginning to think that this is what we are fighting for.

We came in as a no, that is not what we are fighting for. We said we don’t want matchbox houses you are giving us, worse than the matchbox houses of the apartheid and they expect us to celebrate that. So, the enemies’ intentions did not succeed.

Remember, I am a product of Peter Mokaba and Winnie Mandela who were victims of apartheid propaganda and, amongst others, Peter was reported to be a spy, but Peter never looked back.

He used that to influence his determination and resilience to fight for his people. So who am I, accused of woodwork? And I want to be a crybaby when people were accused of being spies. Winnie Mandela … the apartheid regime got into her bedroom, destroyed her from her bedroom, said all manner of things about her.

She never looked back. She soldiered on. Who am I? My bedroom is not discussed. I am not tortured, harassed by the police. For me to look back, and get demoralised by woodwork … I am a product of the most militant and fearless leaders of our revolution and the Boers don’t know that about me.

They think I am easily demoralised and they attack and then vanish. If I speak, I don’t get a reaction, I get worried. It means that the enemies are not receiving the message, so when the enemy responds I am happy that I have hit where it matters the most. The enemy’s talking.

For me it was a cause for celebration that I am making this impact. Giving you very good examples. Julius Malema: woodwork, Peter Mokaba: apartheid spy, Winnie Mandela: cheated on an icon.

We never looked back.

One of the inspirations at the time was Jacob Zuma who was accused of rape, who was accused of corruption and all that. But the man used that as his strength and continued to fight.

So revolution, especially for some of us who are not arrivalists and who are not parachuted into the structures of the revolution, teaches us that we shouldn’t be crybabies. There could actually be worse than woodwork criticism and you need to stand the test of time, so those are testing moments and they are testing you if indeed you’ve got character, indeed you believe in what you are saying or you are going to chicken out because you are criticised heavily and negatively.

JS What was very interesting around Mokaba’s mother’s death earlier this year was just how things often come full circle, so your history around Mokaba and your views on Mokaba and so on, the ANC appears to now be using against you, as if Mokaba only belongs to them and to their history.

I am interested to know in terms of especially youth, because you are talking about very young people on the mines of Marikana who know you from the past. That is essentially the youth vote. We forget it is not only these young people partying down here in Braamfontein. There are millions of young people on the mines and in villages and so on.

How do you reclaim figures like Mokaba and Winnie for, not necessarily for the EFF, but for a new type of movement with all of this resistance from the ANC where they remind us that these people have got nothing to do with anybody else but themselves?

JM No, that is being naïve. First, Mokaba belongs to the ANC. There is no dispute about that, but the ANC produced him for the liberation of society, and therefore society has got all the right to celebrate him.

We are not claiming him. We are celebrating him, and I had very close relationship with Peter’s mother. Every December since Peter passed away, I would take a grocery to her, including buying her a sheep every December, and there was a point when I was the Youth League secretary where we took a decision to unveil a tombstone for Peter.

I was in the delegation that led that process, including approaching a donor about that tombstone.

Peter Mokaba’s brother, Ernest, designed that tombstone and then the donor that time got admitted. He was sick, I don’t know what was his problem, and then, when he was in hospital, I had to visit him so that I also consolidate our agreement on his contribution of the tombstone.

And he told me from his hospital bed that the ANC people who are today claiming to celebrate Peter have visited him, part of Sello Moloto’s faction, visited him and discouraged him from contributing the tombstone.

The taxman was also heavy on him and all sorts of things.

He was just moaning about how the ANC has ill-treated him despite the fact that he has been contributing to build the ANC in the country, and even during difficult days of our struggle.

So, I had to motivate him and say to him, look, we can’t retreat on this and I succeeded. Peter Mokaba’s name was dying a natural death. I contributed in the revival of that name, nationally.

Peter died when I was not a president of the Youth League. There was never such things as Peter Mokaba, the dates … Peter Mokaba memorial lectures.

I developed those concepts in honouring Peter and said, we’re doing that in Limpopo, but when I become the president I said it can’t be a provincial activity, it has to be a national activity because Peter was, you know, a national leader, so some useless fellow travellers who don’t know who Peter is, they don’t know Peter’s mother, they go and talk like we had nothing to do with Peter, we have nothing to do with Peter’s mother.

Peter’s mother, when she died, I received a call at three in the morning from her daughter, so if I didn’t have anything to do with them, why would they call such a person at three in the morning.

Peter Mokaba’s mother, we were so close, she was at my grandmother’s birthday party a year before last year. So, we had developed beyond political relations that type of family relations between the two, you know, families and Peter continues to serve as an inspiration.

JS This is what I want to ask you, what is the significance of Mokaba today and why do you heighten that significance?

JM We use Peter as one young person who grew up under very difficult conditions both from a rural background, from a humble beginning and into a very difficult arena of politics and the apartheid regime, and he never looked back.

He continued to fight for his people and he lived to realise the fruit of what he was fighting for, and Peter, you know, fits very well into the footsteps of President Mandela. Peter’s love for education, Peter’s love for fashion, Peter’s love for politics.

Peter was an all-rounder. He was a dependable force and therefore we used that as a source of inspiration to young people and to the entire nation that we could actually be a Peter Mokaba, all of us in our own right, by being resilient and courageous when we deal with those things that we seek to achieve.

How the police have harassed Peter and his family … if it was anybody else, he would have abandoned the struggle for the sake of peace in his family and for himself. I mean there couldn’t be anything painful like your mother being arrested. Peter’s mother got harassed, got arrested, her house was petrol-bombed.

Somebody petty, somebody who was not carrying the aspirations of the nation on his shoulders would have said, if this is what it is going to cost my family, then I am going home, I am leaving this. But he fought.

His parents supported him to continue to fight. They all got involved in the struggle, the family, the younger sister exiled and all that. To fight for people … that’s what we’re celebrating because individuals in a revolution can also serve as a source of inspiration and it happens worldwide, where we celebrate struggle icons.

JS And so the same would be true of, say, Chris Hani, Moses Mayekiso and just to come back to the question around Winnie Mandela, these are people who you can use, simply off the point of inspiration and a means of directing young people towards your cause rather than your party, but obviously the party benefits.

I think a lot of people were impressed by the way that you conducted yourself in the courtroom around Kill the Boer, and obviously that fear that had grown up around Peter Mokaba all those years ago then came back for those people who were your detractors, mostly white people who needed someone to fear.

JM Look, I don’t think the fear of white people particularly about Julius Malema, I don’t think it’s real. I think it’s a myth that doesn’t exist. I think that if there is a man who had to be celebrated on the streets of South Africa by white people, it’s Julius Malema.

I take more pictures with white people than with black people. White people, especially Afrikaners, by their own nature they are very aggressive and if they do not appreciate an individual they do so without any fear of the way they will confront it.

All my life I have never been confronted in a very destructive way by a white Afrikaner who says you want to mess up our country, you want to kill us, you want to drive us to the sea.

JS So what was AfriForum’s issue, do you think, I mean what drove that invective against you at that time?

JM I think they were tapping on the popularity of Julius Malema to equally market themselves. I think it was a cheap publicity stunt, which came costly on their side because they’ve had to pay lawyers and all sort of things and all that.

Ja, so, for me it was not real. And so, if there is anybody who is scaring white people it’s AfriForum because it is the one that says to them, even when they are unprovoked, hey, they are coming to kill you and so forth.

AfriForum is the enemy of white people, not Julius Malema, because our struggle is a struggle to liberate the oppressed people economically, and that will give white people a freedom to enjoy their resources and not live in fear of being attacked one day by black people.

So, you know, anybody who knows the history of South Africa will know that all ANC messages, all ANC songs during the struggle for total emancipation, they all sounded like racist anti-white messages, but yet the ANC was fighting for a non-racial society and those who hated the ANC accused it, including Madiba, of wanting to commit a white genocide.

They were terrorists wanting to kill all white people. A deliberate distortion of what the struggle was about, despite the fact that policy was well articulated.

The same is with the Economic Freedom Fighters, a non-racial organisation that fights for equal opportunities and rights for all South Africans, not blacks or Africans alone. All, with an emphasis on the blacks in general and Africans in particular because they are the most oppressed people.

So, why should I have, you know, a nightmare about wanting to explain myself to people that have taken a deliberate decision to misunderstand me. They understand me very well and what I represent, but for their convenience, they have chosen to misunderstand me.

It doesn’t matter how many times I explain myself, they have got an agenda to misunderstand everything I say, they say: Ah you see, and then interpret it.

JS And when you say people, who would that currently include?

JM You spoke about AfriForum, they are those types of peoples that you know want to deliberately misrepresent what we stand for and deliberately misunderstand us. I can’t say the same with the ANC. I can’t say the same with the Communist Party or COSATU because the ANC understands very well what we represent.

The ANC actually agreed with us in Durban in the NCG of the ANC, which got us into this trouble we find ourselves in today. The ANC knows us, the ANC knows that what we are fighting for. It’s the truth, the problem is politics of individuals who feel they’re big and therefore cannot be told by small boys as to which direction should the movement take.

They are victims of a tendency called ageism, so they stand to lose all this. It is their own creation. It is their own creation because they have accepted, no, they have failed to accept that the times have changed.

People have celebrated and, you know, accepted wholeheartedly the political freedom. They enjoyed it, they’ve loved it so much and they are saying we must move a step ahead. We can’t get stuck here.

Now we are in a land between the two lands. The land of oppression and the promised land. We need to make progress. People think that we have arrived and they want to station here permanently – and this is not where we are going.

The road ahead is still very long. The ANC understands that very well and the ANC, by the way, is not those individuals who are leading it. The membership of the ANC … and that’s why when we see Mbombela full of people, and we know very well that we’ve got almost 40% of our people in that stadium who are so loyal to the name and the history, but they know very well that we should be making progress into the second phase of our struggle, which is economic emancipation.

JS In January, for the first time maybe in our memory of democracy, in the last 20 years and certainly in the four years after people came home from exile, during CODESA’s time, despite all the violence that was happening, you didn’t have poor communities moving into the suburbs to express their anger or to show the people living there that there was another kind of life.

Chris Hani was very clear on this. He said it’s time people took their experience into the sweet life that the suburbs are experiencing.

So in January you had people from the Princess informal settlement on the West Rand, people who have really had enough, moving into a suburb for the first time.

It was terrifying for the people of the nearby suburb of Lindhaven whose houses were ransacked and pelted with stones.

So is the time coming when we might say, is this now a pattern?

Is there any sense that there is need for violence again? Could an armed struggle happen again, just in a different form? You’ve said it yourself, communities have been patient for so long, so this was the same thing for black people in South Africa prior to the late ’70s when the decision was made to introduce the armed struggle.

Do you fear the violence that might erupt? Do you feel that you have got a duty to control that or do you feel that actually we do need to embark on that type of struggle again?

JM I don’t think that there is room in today’s South Africa for an armed struggle, but as a revolutionary you don’t overrule. The different pillars and strategies of our struggle can be conducted but we have to locate some of those pillars within existing material conditions and if there’s such a room to conduct such a struggle.

I think South Africans appreciate the fact that they are given a constitutional opportunity that can change their lives and it is up to them to use that through voting to change their living conditions.

There is going to be an uprising in South Africa if we are not careful, and that’s why we founded the Economic Freedom Fighters – to give guidance and direction on how the struggle should be conducted so that it doesn’t became anarchic, it doesn’t become violent and directionless, and gets to be hijacked by nobodies who don’t have a genuine agenda to change the lives of our people.

In the absence of that, because nature doesn’t allow a vacuum, there will be an emergence of an ‘unled’ revolution which will pose a threat on all of us. Remember it is no longer you white people alone, even the black elite stands to be a target.

There will come a day where they will say no Range Rovers, not BMWs, no Benz, no nothing in this township, we don’t want anyone coming to show off here when we are dying of hunger.

It wouldn’t be white people who are stopped from entering those townships, it will be the elite, the black elite, so the uprising by the most poverty-stricken people is not only a threat to the white minority, also to the blacks who have made progress through their political connections and all sorts of corruption they have involved themselves in.

So what do we do? We must form a political formation which is going to lead the struggle and give it direction. That’s the reason for the emergence of EFF. EFF is not a trade union.

EFF is a vanguard of the working class and the practice movement in South Africa. What constitutes the working class? The working class is not constituted only by organised labour. That will be naïve and, actually, organised labour or unions have got a potential to be workerist, and only be obsessed with improving their salaries and their working conditions without incorporating the struggles of communities into workers’ struggle.

So we are this party that includes the employed workers, the unemployed workers, the landless people, the homeless, the rural mass, the poorest of the poor into one formation. We are that type of an organisation and this puts us very well, as a leader of the struggles of the working class.

So it will require of the EFF to organise all the Left formations and give that direction. How do you do that? You do that by defining a very clear socialist programme which will usher socialism into South Africa.

The theory on socialism has been debated over and over and over. Many scholars have written about that, but very few have come up with a very clear programme on how to realise socialism.

We want to realise socialism, we want our people to benefit from the resources of the land and we want the state to own the means of production. We are very clear about that and we don’t have to sing, ‘Socialism! Socialism!’ because socialism has been vulgarised and it’s being used to scare people.

We speak to the programme of socialism and those who know what socialism is as an ideology, will hear through our articulation that this is socialist politics.

JS So now you’re talking about the socialism of Hugo Chavez, you’re talking about that strand of Latin American-style socialism.

It’s confusing for people because you’ve said, for example, around attracting the youth, you would use a simplified form of Marxism, because “It speaks to the issues that have always been relevant”.

JM Look, we don’t want to complicate the advancement of Marxism, especially when dealing with ordinary people who, ordinarily, are not politicised.

You have to find a means to simplify it and win them over so that you build a political consciousness of your society, and your society is not simply swayed away from the main agenda by those who are opposed to the type of struggle you advance.

So, our struggle is the one that our people are advancing. They need the land, they need the mineral resources, they need the natural resources. They want to be in charge of their destination, they want an equal society. And we are fighting for that and that is not anti-Marxism.

That is Marxism in practical form and it will take our people to the Promised Land, but this socialism should not be uniformity.

We shouldn’t say Cuba did it this way, we shouldn’t say the Soviet Union did it this way. We must interpret it and give it a local meaning so that it becomes relevant to our people, because if you expect all Marxists to walk like this, to talk like this, to dance like this and all must do that, then it’s bound to fail.

I think that part of … trying to implement Marxism was to try and get everybody to be made out of the same image. It’s not correct. What is done in Venezuela may not be done in China, what is done in China may not be done in Cuba. The socialism with Chinese characteristics, you know.

So why not have our own local [Marxism], without compromising the fundamental principles of Marxism, but introduce it in a manner that it will take everyone along and it will not scare people.

JS I think it is important in that light to also say that in your manifesto, when you are talking about relationships with the global economy, you haven’t isolated that to only socialist economies.

You have also referred to Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan. You have referred to Asian economies which may not have had a socialist background, but which, some as emerging economies, can offer a relevance. You have certainly looked at India.

It is interesting as well that you articulate that around how the resources are all automatically going towards the ocean, but we need to invest and get relationships on this continent.

So, when you developed your manifesto and the ideology that you wish to take to people, without pumping the theoretical issues at them, why are there no African economies in that?

Why are you not using those examples? Do we honestly not have the kinds of economies on this continent that you feel would work here?

JM Look, we draw inspiration from different economies that have succeeded and we looked at what has failed and what has worked. We speak about Zimbabwe, how their land has helped to realise the potential of the people of Zimbabwe.

We look at how the copper mines failed in [the process of] Zambian nationalisation. We look at the leadership of Sankara, and how that can help us improve the leadership style we want to practise.

So, there are generally many African examples that we looked into which received massive attack from the imperialist forces so that they do not succeed, and we’re saying, how do we learn from that? What is it that we can take from them and what is it that we cannot take from that?

For instance from Zimbabwe, we’re taking the land as an example of how Africans can reclaim their land, but we do not take the method used to obtain the land. So when we speak about Zimbabwe, it is very important that you don’t jump and say, ‘Hey, you see now, you see now!’ We are seeing the land, well and good, it’s what we need, but we don’t need violence to obtain the transfer of the land into the hands of rightful owners.

There are many things we can learn from Nigeria and things that we do not want to happen in our country. Why did other failed states in Africa come to that level of a failed state? Are the ideas we are introducing not going to lead us into the same situation we found ourselves in? … The Latin American [countries], how have they done it? The Brazilians, the Venezuelans, the Cubans and all those countries that are beginning to be liberated zones economically and people taking charge.

JS And very much united politically.

JM Yes, Latin America, very much united politically with a big brother, Cuba, serving as that inspiration to them. That unity of Latin America, if applied in southern Africa, with Zimbabwe leading. That type of political relationship and economic independence, it can be a success story to tell the next generation.

That’s why Zimbabwe gets the attack it’s getting, because its success will mean that other countries must follow. So you must oppress Zimbabwe, you must put it under sanctions, you must do everything in your power to ensure that they do not succeed so that no one dares to practise what the Zimbabweans have done.

If we begin to follow, which is what we need to do, and liberate the southern African economy to serve as a source of inspiration for the whole of Africa. If we succeed in economically liberating southern Africa, for which the potential is there, then we are guaranteed of the independence of Africa and I think, for me, we need to use both the success stories of India, the whole of Asia, Japan, the Chinese and the Venezuelans, Latin America – a success in revolutions.

Let’s use that to share the possibility of how Africa can succeed, and we must be happy that we are that generation which has … an opportunity to learn from other successes or failed projects so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

JS So, two controversial questions.

JM Yes, sure.

JS Let’s get Botswana out of the way. Do you still believe there should be a regime change there?

JM [Laughing] There should be.

JS Because this got you into a lot of trouble. Let’s talk about what happened behind the scenes.

JM No, I didn’t get into any trouble. The … ANC agreed that there’s a problem in Botswana. Botswana is always breaking ranks when it comes to SADC positions.

JS Mugabe, etc?

JM Ja, Mugabe especially as it relates to, you know, the imperialist forces. Botswana breaks ranks with the AU on any number of issues, the latest being Kenyatta, Southern Sudan and all manner of things.

I mean, after Zuma voted for the killing of Gaddafi, there was a developed attitude by African states that, ah, it looks like this resolution, it’s wrong. Please give us time to interpret.

Botswana insisted on that sort of intervention, which doesn’t bring a long-lasting solution to Libya. We are witnessing it now, we criticised it then, but Botswana supported such things. Botswana is a problem. Tokyo [Sexwale] gave … very, very, you know, good evidence on the things that they discovered when they were in Botswana, assigned by OR Tambo to go and investigate those things.

This was a veteran of the ANC giving such evidence in the DC⁴ of the ANC, even though we went into detail of how threatening Botswana is to the peace of southern Africa and South Africa, in particular. So Botswana’s opposition must be helped to unite because the disintegration of opposition in Botswana has not helped to remove the puppet regime.

Unity of opposition shouldn’t mean merging it, but they must be strengthened as individual organisations to increase their percentages. The increase of such percentages will reduce the majority of the ruling party and give room for a coalition government, as a start, which will lay a foundation for a fully fledged, you know, alternative in Botswana that will not be controlled by imperialist forces.

It’s not Julius Malema’s decision, it’s an ANC Youth League decision. It is in the Youth League’s resolutions. I was just articulating, on behalf of the Youth League, the resolutions on Botswana. And that was not ill-discipline in terms of ANC conduct, but that [it] was used to further the political differences. The DC of the ANC was used to settle political differences between individuals who were threatened by others’ participation in the structures of the ANC.

It was an excuse, it was not an issue of discipline and we all know that, they know that, they consciously, they know that themselves.

JS I want to talk in a little bit of detail about the disciplinary, because I think it was such an issue around you, but I just wanted to get the subject of Mugabe, you know, also on the table. So, first question, is he funding the EFF?

JM He is not, he is not. Mugabe is not funding EFF.

Since we formed the EFF, we have been trying to get an appointment with some ZANU-PF comrades and it has been very difficult. Look, we speak to some of them individually on the phone and all that, and when they are here, we meet to exchange political ideas and all that, but there hasn’t been any form of a relationship.

The only alliance partner of ZANU-PF in South Africa is the ANC, so we don’t have any formal relations with ZANU-PF. We have never had a meeting with Mugabe. We have never received any monies from Mugabe.

JS As EFF?

JM As EFF, even as individuals. We would wish to receive money from Mugabe because that would be revolutionary money – it would not be money that is accompanied by imperialist conditions.

It would be support for the revolution, in the same way African states did during the apartheid times. [They] supported formations that they believed were advancing a genuine cause. And Zimbabweans, if they want to succeed in the programmes they are having there in Zimbabwe, they will have to start supporting such initiatives outside of Zimbabwe, because they can only be sustainable if other countries start joining them. Because imperialist forces wouldn’t want to have sanctions imposed on the whole of southern Africa or on the whole of Africa.

They wouldn’t do that, so the more we join them, the more chances they get of having their revolution succeed. Zimbabwe can’t operate like a loner. It has to get friends and partners beyond its borders and it has to work with them, and if it means financially supporting such initiatives to get the agenda starting … in other different counties, so be it …

Any form of support for the project to succeed, both materially and ideologically and any other way. Let’s use their method to advance the agenda.

So they have not been forthcoming. We have had some discussions with some of our commissars. We have asked them to actually go and engage in Zimbabwe with different formations and individuals and see what form of, you know, intervention can we get.

They are just from elections. We are going into elections. They can equally share what makes the Zimbabweans accept their radical policies which gave them the two-thirds majority. We can learn one or two things out of that – it’s not only about finance, but also about sharing experiences.

JS Where is this coming from, you know, now all of a sudden there are all of these rumours circulating around that?

JM Around?

JS Around Mugabe and that relationship. You have now articulated what the truth of the situation is. So you don’t know whether it’s emanating from inside the ANC?

JM No, it’s Gwede, it’s Gwede, I don’t know why he likes being painted like that because he has got potential as a leader to articulate on very complex political questions, but he degenerates all the time.

I don’t know why. I don’t know what happened, I mean all the time, he’s not scared to just throw a lousy allegation around and it becomes a serious issue.

JS Is he angry with you?

JM No, he’s not angry with me. He doesn’t appreciate the position he holds and its influence. You don’t just speak loosely like that, especially when you are in that position – When we were in the Youth League, Gwede used to say we were being trained by Zimbabweans. He hated the beret.

I was so, like, ‘Wow’ when he was defending the beret now, when the ANC did a red beret. Gwede was saying, we are trained by … Zimbabwe and I was like, ah man, it can’t be? A man, a leader in his position, to just come with such wild allegations like that. It can’t be, you know.

One day I want to just take a credible journalist who enjoys the respect and credibility of our people, and we’ll print the financial statement of EFF and give it to them, not to print it, just to go through and not write figures and all that. So that you can see if there is any suspicious transaction …

You will get the beret money and membership money and one or two or three people who have contributed either R20 000, R50 000 and all that.

Otherwise we survive on the beret.

JS Okay, so right now you have got about a 400 000 membership, everybody is paying R10. By the way, on that, it’s important that one also situates the fact, as you have, that … R10 is actually a lot of money. So they are giving you perhaps their last R10 or some way in which they have got R10 together.

JM Some are refusing to pay, they refuse. I went to a funeral in the village where my grandfather comes from and after the funeral there were four ladies who came to me – “Malema, we want to join your party, but we can’t pay R10. We don’t have it. We want to join now.”

They don’t have it. The R10 to get a plastic card and the R10 to buy bread … which they need for themselves and their children.

JS So what do you say to those people?

JM But we can’t, we can’t give it for free because R10 is not for money making. It’s a show of commitment to the cause. You have to do something for the cause because if you pay R10, you will then take it upon yourself to go and see where my money went.

JS What are you giving them for R10?

JM They get a card, which is very expensive to print because it’s printed with colour … Ja, so it is only that, but the experience tells us that when people have paid money they always follow that money.

Where did my R10 go? I want to see. When they come to follow up the R10, they get baptised with politics and their consciousness grows beyond wanting to follow R10. Now they realise, it’s not only R10. This is bigger than R10. This is my home. This is where we belong. I want to take part in changing the lives of our people, so that sign of commitment through contributing R10 is what we are asking for.

And that’s why we have got a criterion in the EFF of paid-up membership and unpaid membership, but there are members who have not paid, you see, and we are still waiting for their R10.

One day they will get a bonus, they will have R30 and they will go, like, let me settle.

JS But it does put poverty into perspective for people. Because for us, R10 is very little. So there is a situation at the moment where—

JM But our membership is the cheapest. Ours is the cheapest. I think the ANC one is R12 and COPE is R50.

JS But now you have a situation where two political parties are struggling. We read that COPE may be bankrupt, Agang was alleged to not have paid salaries for three months—

Now that you are actually campaigning, and you’re realising the costs attached to that. It is huge. Do you have a fear around funding?

What is your solidarity framework around money? There must be some way that you can sustain yourself. Obviously you don’t want people not being paid for three months because then they become disillusioned.

JM No, no one gets paid here. No, no one gets paid in the EFF.

JS So no one is getting paid at the moment, including yourself, Julius?

JM No, no.

JS So, how are you surviving?

JM I am a beggar. I am a beggar and you know it’s literally like that, it’s literally like that. Whatever cent we get, we share it, we eat from the same plate. When you don’t have electricity or you’ve not paid your car, it becomes everybody’s nightmare. But it becomes a nightmare for everybody, you know, like how do we help one of us who is battling like that? You know it’s bad like that. It’s bad.

JS And has it been bad already?

JM Come again?

JS Is it already difficult?

JM It has been difficult from the first day. We have never had a luxury of enjoying some foreign funding, like Agang and all that. But we knew that it’s going to be bad, we knew forming a party is the most expensive thing. Extremely.

But we sell our berets in bulk. We don’t sell one by one from head office. You buy 100, from 100 upwards. 100 each for R80, so … the amount is R8 000 or so. So, if we get three or four people to buy that 100, then we know we have settled the rent.

JS And those people can then sell the berets off as they please?

JM Sell themselves, the way they want. Some are selling for R150 and all those things. Yes, so the beret has been very helpful. Now we are introducing different types of shirts. You would have seen the shirts that I wear.

JS Yes and even different hats, I have seen.

JM Ja, and different types of things have been produced and our people are buying now, so we are surviving through merchandise. Because we have taken a decision that we don’t want a luxurious campaign, we don’t want an expensive campaign. House to house, community meetings, small as they are, as long we can have many of those …

If we have met 40 communities with almost 1 000 people participating, we have met 40 000 people or more. That would be very expensive for you to bring them into Orlando stadium in the form of a rally, but those who bring 40 000 people in the stadium, you are in the same situation as them because, although you have not met 40 000 all at once, you have met 40 communities, each with not less than 1 000 people. And that’s our strategy.

Yesterday we were in Tembisa for our preparatory committee meeting for our launch rally. We’re supposed to have met in a hall in Tembisa, next to a hostel, but we couldn’t have a meeting because, when we arrived there, the hall was full of people from the hostels.

They had heard we were coming there. We had to leave that venue quietly. The only venue we could find was a crèche in Winnie Mandela. We had the meeting there. When we got out – just people [everywhere]. It was eleven at night or so – the streets were full of people.

I went a distance far from the hostels. This is a different constituency at night. We are there to talk to them and this is what distances us from Agang. Mamphela Ramphele is refusing to walk on the ground.

JS We have just talked about this, whether you have approached her?

JM No, I didn’t approach her. She has refused. She is appreciating the only way we can win these people is by going to them and they get very excited that Julius Malema is in this shack here holding a meeting in our area.

That’s what our people want, accessible leadership, so that’s our campaign.

There is no money, literally no money. And then personally I have seen my cousins coming in, from close relatives to distant relatives, calling, supporting and they said if you want anything you must call, we’ll see how we contribute.

So when I get frustrated in KZN without accommodation I call them and they say – No fine, we will see what we can do, and they go all out to contribute, sort out the accommodation because also family members have taken a conscious decision to be supportive.

I am talking, you know, from a personal experience. Ja, and comrades may not have those types of support, many of them, and it is very difficult, but it is equally so humbling and touching to see the type of effort comrades make.

I mean you get a comrade from the Eastern Cape in Mpumalanga who serves in the national leadership, going there to help because the commander-in-chief is going to Mpumalanga, so we need to go there.

You are right there, you find them working, you are like, how did they arrive here? They used their own resources. The organisation doesn’t transport them. They share rooms, sleep three, four in one hotel room.

[They] wake up the following day and continued with work as if nothing happened. There are no luxuries, nothing, and it is so touching that it reminds you of struggle days where people take it upon themselves to fight for a cause.

The launch in Marikana was a turning point. It actually reminded us of 1993, 1994 … people going to tear some branches on the tree, tie it on their head and start walking to the rally to make a shade.

You know it is a struggle spirit, because when we were in the Youth League, we were swimming in the pool of luxury and we used to have a debate in the Youth League, people saying they can’t share rooms. No, we can’t share rooms, they say – ‘When I come to meetings, why must I share rooms?’ and all that. And now … people [are] not arguing about such things. They are ready.

… They know if you are leaving here, the next programme is in North West. Once they see this meeting has taken place they immediately leave to the next programme. [If] they know you are coming that side, they must be prepared to help those people. But also those people, when they see people coming from outside their province, they get energised, they get motivated, work hard, the commander-in-chief is coming, you know. It’s so humbling that our people have taken it upon themselves to fight for their cause.

JS These kinds of stories are similar to the ones that Mavuso Msimang tells, and Max Sisulu, about when they were young, in exile, in Lusaka.

I want to know the story of the red berets. As we’ve said, Mantashe was wrong in saying – No, it was always an ANC thing. You yourself have said you wore black berets, so when you were developing this, what a very clever marketing ploy, who said let’s do this and let’s do it this way? Because it has worked extremely well. There are a whole different number of reasons why now you are distinctive and it seems to be such a simple lever. Was it you?

JM Yes, look, the red colour is symbolising Leftist politics internationally and when we took the position we took, of being an alternative radical left, for me it had to be red.

The first EFF press conference, I called Floyd. I said, Floyd, when we were in the Youth League there used to be a guy who used to print things for us quickly and all that. Can you get me a red beret? Me – Get me a red beret, I want to address the press conference with a red beret, and then [Floyd] said, no fine, I know that guy, I will call him and do it.

It was only when I came in that I found that Floyd had printed berets for everyone and that was so good because it gave a very good picture.

But I had placed an order for myself because I was wearing a black beret in the Youth League and I couldn’t wear the same colour because we were about to bring an alternative to what used to be our home. So an alternative would have meant that also the colours must change, and red was the immediate colour I thought of.

I served all my life, almost, as the president of the Youth League. I went into press conferences with a beret then and I thought, I am not going into this one without one, so I will need a red one, and then Floyd spontaneously decided to bring them for everybody – and, wonderful!

So there was never a red beret in the Youth League. It was not a Youth League decision, because if you said that the berets should be red, it would have to be a decision taken and not spontaneous.

I was wearing a black beret of my own. It was not Youth League regalia. No, it was an individual choice, so therefore the Youth League can’t say we made a decision on the red beret.

… I think [it was] the old-aged Mzwandile who says that the Youth League took a decision on the red beret at the Midrand conference. I presided over that conference. He doesn’t even know who ruled over those resolutions and how they look. I know those resolutions. There is no such a thing. Actually in Midrand, if you remember we were wearing journalist jackets. The one with short sleeves.

Ja, and then the hat we’re wearing, was a camouflaged hat with a Youth League logo. That was an official decision of the merchandise we were going to print for the Youth League.

The ANC, its colours, they are not red. It doesn’t have red anywhere. To introduce a red beret is disingenuous and dishonest and to want to defend it, the way they are doing, they must be ashamed.

So why am I saying they can’t have a red beret, the ANC? Because they don’t have that colour in their colours. Your [organisation’s] merchandise, you make it out of the colours of your organisation. Just imagine one day the ZCC just prints dresses for women with green kit. There is no such a colour in the colours of the ZCC.

JS And the ANC has such dominant strong, well-loved traditional colours.

JM You know – and if they were so desperate for red, they could have … given the people Communist Party red, a beret. We wouldn’t have fought about the colour because the Communist Party has had that colour forever and ever. It’s not in dispute, but the Communist Party did not have the red beret and so it can’t be correct.

JS Even the language which has been very effective – to call people ‘fighters’. This is very interesting because it does also give you a different situation. So if you are a member of the EFF, you are not just a member of the EFF, you are a fighter. Who developed these ideas?

JM No, it’s a language that we [developed]. First we agreed that we are not going to call ourselves by traditional names, because traditional names make people … comfortable with the positions and they think they are something they are not. Like executive committees, you know, you start behaving like you must wear a tie and suit to meet your position halfway.

No, we are a central command team, forces must be commanded, ground forces must be ready, there must always be that military discipline and determination to want to emerge victorious.

The language you use is very important. I learnt this from Cuban politics – I went to Cuba for months to political school.

They have always taught us that the language you use to call meetings, how you articulate yourself, how you call each other, influences whether people will come to meetings or not. So we agreed that this is how we are going to call ourselves to give people a sense of a fight which is going on, and they must not relax and think that we have arrived.

They know we are fighters, we must fight to change the living conditions of their people, so we will always strive for a different type of, you know, presence which will make us unique.

Yesterday we were doing a poster for the elections. We were enquiring with the IEC whether it is acceptable for a person to wear, to appear on the ballot paper with a beret and all that.

They came back and said no, it is allowed, there’s no problem. So we set out this picture with a beret and all that. It seems to be a consensus that we must wear a beret on the ballot paper and all our posters.

Should we have a poster calling Malema for president? And we said, for what? Because in South Africa there are no presidential elections, so let them call themselves candidate rather. There is no such a thing. This is party parliamentary politics and people choose their party.

So, no Malema for president. We would rather come with a unique message, which will marshal your forces and you don’t seem to be part of the whole group of politicians who do and say almost the same thing.

So we always sit down and say, how do we present ourselves differently because what we’re saying is that we are an alternative. You can’t be seen as an alternative if you do what they do, so you need to model yourself and present yourself in a different way and there is no specialist amongst us.

There is no, nothing, there is just us, the activists.

JS Floyd was talking to me about the red background, the white background. Now in this poster you are wearing a suit. Okay, admittedly there is a red tie. But what is that about? Why weren’t you wearing the beret, for example, in this poster? Is it the kind of image that you need to portray to the widest possible constituency?

JM We live in a society where corporate image … has got an impact and you need to appeal to a different constituency, but you also need to tell them that we can also do these things that you think we can’t do of being presentable and corporate like and all that.

So, this’s just giving another side of Julius Malema, and who said wearing a suit and a tie is not revolutionary? I mean Chavez used to wear suits. So did Fidel Castro.

So although we are fighting for the working class, our politics resonates very well with the black middle class – still a subject of exploitation, particularly at their work places where their junior staff behave like they are their senior staff just because of the colour of their skin.

They come to join the firm now, they teach them work, within three months they will be reporting to the same white people. They are doing the same job, they are not getting the same salary and all that. So, they still feel that pain.

They can actually relate to the politics we are articulating as economic freedom fighters and you need to give them that kind of comfort as well, that we are not just a group of militant people. That we are leadership and we can fit very well into any type of responsibility you want to assign us to because we are all all-rounders and that’s what an activist and a fighter of economic freedom fighters should be.

You must be able to relate to different constituencies and appeal to them.

JS What was the last conversation that you had with Zuma? Do you remember it?

JM I can’t remember [laughs]. I can’t remember.

JS Was it acrimonious? Do you have a sense of it being an ending conversation; that it might be the last one you ever have?

JM Well, look, first I never had frequent, consistent conversation with Zuma. We were not that close, so I wouldn’t say there was a point where we enjoyed this close, cosy relationship.

JS At all?

JM At all, at all. But if I had an issue to raise with him I would go to his house, I would go to his office and raise those issues. But I didn’t have a special plate in Zuma’s house. So that’s why I wouldn’t even remember when was the last time I spoke to JZ.

The last time I touched his hand was during the centenary rally of the ANC in Bloemfontein. Ja, if my memory’s not fading me, that was the last time I hugged Zuma, with his pretentious mind and all those things.

It was as he was coming closer to me, he opened his arms and said Mongamela, meaning ‘president’. I was already on suspension then. So he hugged me and we greeted. That was it. From there I have never had any conversation with JZ.

The person that I used to call during those times was Gwede. Actually Gwede the last time we met was when we went to do the out-of-court settlement with AfriForum, and I was already out of the ANC then.

JS It felt to many people, I think the impression was somehow, yes, you and Zuma were close. But I don’t think people always understand the ANC’s true culture very well.

If we talk about your disciplinary [hearing], for example, did that mean that you were personally hurt by Cyril Ramaphosa? Did that mean that you had to reassess the type of person you thought, say, he was? What was your relationship with somebody like him prior to that DC?

JM I have never had a relationship with Cyril. I have never known Cyril. I was never close to Cyril in any shape or form – never. And I have never even before that heard Cyril speak anywhere.

I just knew that Cyril had sold out, that Cyril was disgruntled because Mandela didn’t appoint him to deputy president. He didn’t even attend Mandela’s inauguration.

So Cyril for me was a biggest opportunist who abandoned his class consciousness for money, and all of a sudden became a millionaire and all that. So I have always had that type of an attitude. But I had a soft spot for him for the simple reason that he came from Limpopo and had that type of a background. And I thought that Limpopo people can always relate and engage easily on issues. But personally I didn’t have any issues.

I used the limited information I had on him to judge his character as a person. I knew appearing before him was risky because he was in the deep pockets of big mining companies, and one of the ANC’s senior leaders actually told me that Cyril was a personal project of the Oppenheimers who handpicked him and worked very hard to take him through. And one of the things he had asked them was to be president of South Africa and a commitment, they said, they will take him.

So for me he remained an agent.⁵ Also the part of not very clear accountability of how Cyril used to leave the country through legal means, the airports and all those things and how he has not suffered seriously harassment like others did during those difficult times.

Ah, for me it looked very dodgy and he didn’t come across as someone very genuine and legitimate. So I never had respect for him. Mokaba didn’t like him anyway, so I’m Mokaba’s man. So if Peter has got a problem with someone, I know that there should be some serious fundamental problems with that type of an individual.

[The Youth League] didn’t support him, when he was elected the secretary general of the ANC … The Youth League didn’t support Cyril and that was the most radical, politically grounded ANC Youth League so there should have been something they knew and it was unfortunate Peter is not here to give us answers.

The person that has actually disappointed me extremely is JZ because we had too much confidence in him, and personally, me and him, we had lines of communication. He could call me anytime.

I mean that day when I dealt with the BBC journalist, Zuma called me the following day and said, I think you’ve gone overboard and it didn’t come out nicely. You have to find a way of correcting it, and I said to him, it was on the phone, I said, ‘No, I’m going to have an interview now with SAFM in the next 30 minutes or so.’ So I would apologise, and I did exactly that and because it was, you know, a genuine concern which even myself, I was thinking about it and how I reacted.

So we had that type of a channel of communication.

Zuma would then start saying we don’t support the team and all that. Again, he never used his seniority, an elderly statesman to call us in and want to appreciate what really happened. What is it that I have done which makes the Youth League uncomfortable and all that? And then he used his power to manipulate the ANC’s processes to get rid of us, on political differences which could have been resolved politically.

I mean, if Zuma had said to us, come here, if you want SG⁶, it’s not going to happen because of one, two, three, four. I went to have a meeting with JZ in his house in Durban, me and Mbalula when we were burying the chairperson of the ANC in the Ethekwini region. After that we left together to his house and we discussed for a very long time about how we are treating each other with suspicion and then—

JS Were you sitting in a car, the two of you and a driver?

JM No, we were sitting in the house.

JS Oh, you were already in his house.

JM We left the funeral to his house. We were even eating there. Eating nicely.

JS And it was a kind of private thing, just between the two of you?

JM The three of us.

JS You were with Mbalula—

JM Me, Mbalula and JZ. Me and Mbalula you couldn’t separate us, we were going everywhere together and all that. But I’m not talking with him anymore. I only saw him … in January in Cape Town for the first time since the formation of the EFF.

He had an attitude. It was a bit uncomfortable, so I said, no, I’m not going to bother myself. I’m not going to impose myself if he fears he’s going to be victimised. I don’t want to be blamed for having failed his career. I’ve seen it coming.

Anyway, so we were sitting there.

We had an honest debate about the country, about corruption, about what needs to happen going forward, and all sorts of things. And when we left, we were like, we are on the same side. Monday, Zuma is a different person altogether.

JS What is your belief as to—

JM No, Zuma is dishonest. No, he is not an honourable person. You speak to him – I suspect he doesn’t tell you what are the real issues. He pretends like everything is fine, then when you are going to meetings, he is a different character altogether.

JS So the trust was absent—

JM Then, from there I just said this man can’t be relied on and then there were attempts and attempts. There was a day where actually Zizi Kodwa called me and Zizi was my friend also, he was worried about the relationships and he said please, please, my brother, create time and go and see the old man. Just go alone and go see the old man and even during the DC, Zizi was trying to navigate through something to get us to meet and all that.

But it couldn’t happen, I mean, I told Zizi, I also told Mbalula, I have no problem meeting with JZ, but I am going to leave the meeting with an impression that all is well and good, only to find that …

So I said it’s not always advisable to meet JZ because when he comes to a meeting, he speaks like there was never any form of interaction between you and me, so I can’t be frequenting Zuma’s house, when I know the man is dishonest and does whatever he wants to do.

And then Zizi said okay – Zizi fought and said you can’t be tired of talking to each other as president to president. It doesn’t matter what the result, but there couldn’t be a point when you take a decision that you are no longer meeting.

I said, Ag I am not going, and that’s how the whole thing collapsed. I was no longer engaging.

JS Did you feel hurt by him? Did it have an emotional impact on you?

JM Yes, it did, it did. For a person that you have contributed so much in his defence and in the defence of the movement, and the movement that you would have wished to be a part of all your life. There was never a point where I ever thought I could leave the ANC because I have known the ANC all my life.

So, it was so disappointing and I think I am not the only one. I think he has disappointed many of those who have trusted him.

We all saw him as an old man, we all saw him as a father figure, we all saw him as a unifier, but he was the opposite—

JS What are the issues? Is it personality flaws?

JM Ja, Zuma is not loyal to anybody. All those people who have been there for him have been on a receiving end of his leadership style.

JS But then, why does he remain? This is obviously a key question. Had you stayed inside the ANC, do you believe you could have been a lever to recall him? But why does he remain so powerful?

JM No, no, he is not powerful. If we had remained in the ANC we would have removed Zuma as president, we would have removed him so easily and successfully. Our problems started in the NGC of the ANC, when Zuma, Cyril, Trevor, Max Sisulu, all those big guys of the ANC said they will never be such a discussion on nationalisation and expropriation of land in the ANC. Even when we’re discussing it.

JS Does that mean they shut down dissent, they shut down an alternative point of view?

JM No, I am trying to give you a history.

And then even when the NGC was going on, they were doing interviews outside … there is no nationalisation, and all sorts of things. Things are going very well.

Then we went inside the plenary to take discussions and everyone agreed on consensus on nationalisation. Jeff Radebe tried to suppress it and the conference rose and said to Radebe, as the chair of the meeting, you are not summarising the consensus of the meeting.

He was pushed to a point where it nearly led to the collapse of the NGC in Durban. The NGC before the Mangaung conference. And they lost that debate completely, and that was losing authority as leadership, and they realised it then that these young people are extremely influential and if they are not taken care of, they will remove us as leadership.

And we were almost there, and that’s when they manipulated the process, called us into the DC to suppress dissent, like you were saying, and they removed the whole agenda of economic freedom from the ANC agenda and started rigging branches of the ANC.

JS But why, on such a fundamental issue that is absolutely integral to every single aspect of South African life – which is the poor of this country – do you think the ANC abandoned that agenda?

Have they, not the movement itself, not all party members themselves, but the current leadership, become so alienated that you and the group of people around you in the ANC Youth League, who were promoting that agenda, became enemies? Why? What happened inside the leadership that they seemed to lose touch with the poor?

JM After the NGC, we went then to Mangaung, and then every structure that looked like it was still advancing that agenda was attacked. Then Limpopo was removed, was disbanded, and then the Youth League was disbanded, precisely because capital had captured the ANC.

Capital had completely captured the ANC and there were capitalists running the ANC from outside. Remember, [Johann] Rupert said the Youth League is like an irritating mosquito in a tent. It needs Doom. Cyril, Trevor, Jeff, Jacob, all of them became that Doom which Rupert spoke about.

I mean we get to appeal the decision. Okay, the DC first, then can I go. [Rupert] said a white Afrikaner feels unsettled and uncomfortable with our posture on issues of the dominance of Afrikaners and white people in particular in South Africa.

Collins Chabane is the Minister in Jacob Zuma’s office and feels threatened by our presence because we want to remove Jacob Zuma.

And then Susan Shabangu said nationalisation will never happen in her lifetime. She sits there to prosecute people who are advocating for nationalisation, which she said will never happen in her lifetime.

Ayanda Dlodlo, who’s the secretary general of MKMVA⁷ at the time, a very close confidant of Jacob Zuma … they sit there, they found us guilty.

We appeal.

A stupid thing we did was appeal, I think. We should have known politically that we were actually taking ourselves to the higher structure of hanging people because there is Cyril Ramaphosa, the ‘Oppenheimer’, is prosecuting us, to listen to us appeal. There is Trevor Manuel. There is Jeff Radebe whose wife is involved in business, whose brother-in-law is the big black mining magnate in South Africa.

Who else was there? Yes, those I can remember. Now you get prosecuted by people who have expressed themselves, politically, that they do not agree with your agenda and these people are captured by capital … Cyril Oppenheimer married to Patrice Motsepe’s sister … they are all in the mines, and we want to take their mines. Trevor Manuel is worse. And that’s precisely because the ANC was captured by capital. The working class has lost the ANC.

JS But how did that happen, how did they allow that to happen?

JM Through manipulation. When you are in power, remember you have got too much power. You can dispense patronage, you can give people money, you can use the power of the structures you are leading to legitimise you as a leader and your faction as leadership. So we are led by a faction, which abandoned the political morality of the African National Congress to advance factional agendas which were sponsored by capital. Everything [that happened] in Mangaung disappears, as does what we have achieved in the NGC of the ANC.

So, when we formed the Economic Freedom Fighters, this was equally through the appreciation that the ANC has been captured by capital and an understanding that any agenda which seeks to advance leftist politics will never be tolerated.

I think that the last point on this aspect – there was a song which was created by the KZN people when we were expelled. They were singing it in Mangaung.

It said, “Malema, you almost misled us and we almost believed you,” but they sang it in Zulu … which is a sign of an appreciation that the masses were moved, including those in Zuma’s own province.

Masses were moved, like the agenda of the Youth League was the way to go.

JS Getting now to some of the policy issues …

There is a quote where you were saying that young women “should not queue for grants, they should be at work with their make-up on”.

“You will see how beautiful a working person is. When someone starts working, her beauty is plain for all to see. The hairstyle is elegant. Hunger and poverty hide their beauty. We can’t see it. But give them jobs and you will see it.”

Now when you think about social grants as a lever to provide people with some kind of base out of which they might create a place for themselves in the economy, are you saying that the EFF doesn’t want social grants to be part of your economic policy?

What is your position?

JM No, social grants are part of our economic policy, but they can’t be a long-lasting solution to the problem of poverty confronted by our people and it looks like there is somebody who thinks that they must be celebrated, they must be long term.

It can’t be. You can’t produce a dependency state. We need our people to be dependent, we need our people to work for their living … they are ashamed of themselves, they are not proud of those social grants, it humiliates them.

But they accept it because there’s nothing in the immediate [future] to help them, you know, reduce poverty.

So the solution is job creation, where they will work very hard and they will celebrate their hard work when they are paid those salaries, and jobs have got a way of restoring dignity and you are not regarded as a person who just receives free money and not doing anything.

It helps revive your pride and your dignity. That’s what a job does and the restoration of the dignity of the black people cannot rely on social grants, child support grants. We need to give more actually to the elderly because the elderly, they look after families and they’re being regarded as a dependable force by all around them and they are the ones who without fail pay for their services, they are the ones who are concerned about children going to school, they are the ones that are extremely concerned about providing food for their children and their grandchildren.

So again there is somebody sitting wherever who tries to distort what I am saying with a view to scare me that no, we lose votes, don’t talk about social grants, child support grants.

It’s a temporary measure, but we continue to implement it, but it is not a long-term sustainable solution for the eradication of poverty. And somebody this morning sent me an SMS and said, No, Malema, this thing of child support grants, you must not talk about it because women don’t want to work.

I say, what are you talking about? It is not true. It’s not true that a woman doesn’t want to work, our women have proven to be one of the hard workers and who are very good at what they are doing. You give them opportunity, you will see that women want to work.

So it must never be that our women are a bunch of lazy people, who must just be given social grants, because they don’t want to work.

It’s not true. Women want to work. And we need to give priority especially to those with children so that they can continue to feed their children and provide for them.

So that’s where we come from. We’re not saying we do away with social grants, we’ll give our people social grants, they are an immediate temporary relief, they are proven to have some impact.

But it can’t be a long-term solution.

JS And obviously what that feeds into is one of your dominant positions, around jobs. So here we have a ruling party which has, in 20 years, not really been able to change the status quo.

So people will naturally ask, you know, as the ANC and the DA move closer together in terms of what you regard as their neo-liberal policies, they will say, what will the EFF be able to do differently?

We are confronted by a society that is dominated by the poor, that has close to a 37% effective unemployment rate.

What on earth can the EFF possibly do to change that?

JM They can’t create jobs if they do not own the means of production, because neo-liberal policies encourages maximisation of profit by private capital, and private capital by its own nature has its intention to maximise profit.

Why create jobs? A job that can be done by five people, is done by two people and the salary which was supposed to go into the three others who are cut out of that job, doesn’t even go into these two who are performing the job of five people.

It goes into the dividends and is declared profit, stealing from the workers. So you can’t create jobs as long as you do not own the land, you do not own the minerals, you do not own the natural resources.

With the land alone and the protection of agricultural industry, you can create a lot of jobs. If you want to think of any sector, be it those who produce beef, meat – it is not protected. Chicken, it is not protected. Mealie meal, it is not protected.

There is nothing protected produced by South Africans. And it has been proven that actually the chicken from Brazil comes much more cheaper in South Africa and is sold very cheap, undermining the chicken industry.

You know, I am just giving that as an example.

And you spend R4 to buy a Brazilian chicken and R12 to buy a Zimbabwean chicken, so you will rather buy a Brazilian chicken and once you buy Brazilian chicken you are lowering the production of the South African chicken, if not killing it completely, and once you lower the production because the demand is not high, you are leading to the release of those who are working because there is no longer production and demand and you contribute to the increase of the unemployment because of the unprotected market in South Africa.

So it’s wrong, agriculture must be protected.

South African products, the things that we can produce and we are good at producing, they must be deliberately protected and not just open this economy for world exploitation without any benefits to South African markets.

So agriculture turned things around in Brazil. The mineral resources turned things around in Venezuela, you know, and gave quality healthcare, education and all sorts of things for those nationalised economies.

So you can’t create jobs if you do not own your own economy. It’s foreign-owned, it’s driven by market forces who want to maximise profit and pay workers low wages. These two performing a job of five, that salary which was supposed to go to three, it doesn’t go to them.

They also don’t get a salary for two. They get less than a salary for two. So, that is extreme exploitation and that’s what we will do different.

Firstly, we need to own our land, and then use our land to produce for ourselves and for the whole world, and protect every sector of the economy which produces and creates jobs for us.

JS You are talking very strongly about a food economy, which is a very important thing in light of the fact how much we export.

The next response would be – well, you have to take into account international markets, you know. The effect of those kinds of policies simply on currency, on belief in the country and so on.

How much has been built into your thinking of the attention you have to pay to Western democracies’ response to the thought of a democratic socialist government in South Africa?

JM Look, the Western market forces are not even considered in this perspective because ordinarily they would not agree, it’s against what they represent, which is exploitation, exclusion and dominance of the world economy.

So we will have to look for alternative markets and markets that are prepared to invest in Africa through the terms determined by African leadership.

And the Asian markets are emerging very well … also in terms of their population, it makes it easier for us to target them as alternative markets.

Look, the Russian market as well, which has been in consistent competition with other Western markets … presenting themselves as an alternative and a big brother in the international economy.

They are also willing to engage in economies that are people-driven and people-owned economies. And we always give an example on how the Chinese have done it, for instance, with the tobacco industry.

Owned by 4 400 white Rhodesian families, and then the Zimbabweans seized that. Now owned by more than 40 000 indigenous African people and sells more than what 4 400 white families were selling. And the Chinese are buying the Zimbabwean tobacco. It’s doing very well, you know.

So the mining sector in Zimbabwe continues to produce. The Zimplants has not closed shop despite that the people have taken a very, very clear decision of what needs to happen with their mineral resources and participation by indigenous people and all that.

They say artificial or just formal imposing of sanctions on Zimbabwe, yet go underground to want to source some of the things that they need to sustain their economies.

They speak very bad, I have never met any white person who speaks very good of Zimbabwe on the streets, but the reality is that SAA has increased the size of the plane [which flies] between South Africa and Zimbabwe, and 99% of those in those planes are white people. We are still trading with Zimbabwe.

Investors don’t want ambiguous policies. They want firm, clear policy. Where does South Africa stand on this, when they didn’t get approached and they say, okay, where do we get in there, how can we make money out of that type of a place?

That’s what market forces want: a clear, determined policy.

China is a state-owned economy. They are trading with it, including Americans. They are owing China a lot of money. So why are they trading with China?

There is stability, the currency is consistent, they are trading internationally, they have got a well-organised market that all of us need, those who are in business. So, if you don’t do business with China, one of the advantages, they have … a population.

If you don’t do business with them, it means you don’t do business with almost 50% of the world population, and then you are disadvantaged.

So, Chinese have got a population. It gives them an advantage.

What do we have as South Africans that gives us an advantage? Minerals. We must be in charge of our minerals and hold them very firmly and negotiate and say, this is how we are going to engage with each other, and if you don’t agree, hard luck, you are out.

South Africans need to appreciate the fact that there will be a serious backlash in the immediate when we engage in such a type of policies, but I don’t expect a very harsh attitude from the Western forces if the method used is constitutional, is within the law and the democratic means are used to transfer ownership of the economy into the hands of the people.

JS I think there are two important issues here around private property. What you would envisage, and just to come back to Venezuela again, where, as we know, this is not a feature of their economy.

And secondly, just to discuss what you would envisage around a state-owned mining company and how that would play out in terms of miners in general?

JM Look, private property, it should be guaranteed. Our people should continue, particularly the residential areas.

The nationalisation of mines, banks and monopoly industries doesn’t include spaza shops, doesn’t include people’s private homes and all. We are speaking big industries here. But you must continue to have your saloon. Why must we tamper with it?

We must continue to have a mini-factory producing just for these people here what you produce for them.

It shouldn’t be a wholesale nationalisation which restricts private participation in business. We don’t talk about that. That’s why I said we need socialism that will reflect the true state of South African people.

And part of which is that the people are exposed to private ownership of certain things which they can’t let go. And we are not going to be taking people’s houses and saying this is now communal land. No. No.

JS And farmers?

JM The farms must be integrated between the white owners and the communities which have been robbed of this land.

The process of doing that, we need to put a system in place to guarantee protection, because the integration of a farmer into the broader community should not lead to lowering of the production of that farm. So, the land should be the property of the state and the state should be able to determine how this land is going to be used.

I am saying so because if we allow private ownership, we’re going to undermine our sovereignty. Bill Gates with all his money, he can buy South Africa, the whole of it and decide what he wants to do with it. I mean a place like Northern Cape can be bought and fenced with a wall. They’ve got money. We shouldn’t allow foreign ownership of the land. We shouldn’t allow private ownership of the land, because it will undermine the sovereignty of the country.

If the marked territory called South Africa is in the private hands, then what is the responsibility of the state? The state’s role is minimised, if not eradicated completely. We are all under one man called Oppenheimer.

The Oppenheimers are owning a big land, bigger than many cities in Zimbabwe. For you to see it you have to go through that land, over with a chopper. And even for the chopper to go all over that land, it will have to refuel. That’s how big the land is in Zimbabwe, owned by a private, individual family. We can’t allow that. An individual can’t have monopoly over the land, because the land is the one that determines your sovereignty and your identity as a state. What kind of a state are you if you don’t have a land which gives you your sovereignty?

JS Let’s talk about the possibility of a so-called ‘African Spring’. Is it your view that if the ANC returns to power with the kind of majority it feels it needs, say, to even be able to change the Constitution, do you have a real concern or even a fear that this could be the outcome – if we have another five years of the ANC?

JM I don’t think there will be a revolt based on the ANC winning elections. The revolt is based on the inability to change the material living conditions of our people. It can happen next year, it can happen next month. Our people’s anger is boiling and the EFF is trying to give it direction.

The ANC has actually abandoned that responsibility. It is no longer speaking to the angry masses of our people. They speak to them through television, they speak to them through newspapers. When they go to them, they insult them, saying we don’t want your dirty votes and all sorts of utterances, which is a clear indication that they’ve abandoned their responsibility to provide leadership to the poorest of the poor, and we have had to assume that responsibility.

JS Do you have any belief that the ANC can materially alter the living conditions of the poor of this country?

JM I don’t have that belief that the ANC can change anything. What is it they are going to do which they have not done in the past in 20 years? Twenty years is far too long and you also become very comfortable because, despite messing up, people have kept on voting for you – and not because you are doing anything right, but because you are honouring history and they were honouring our struggle icons.

Now, liberation movements ordinarily, after 20 years, become very irrelevant precisely because they only understand the political conditions of their county, but never know the economies.

They don’t know what actually constitutes the economy of the country. They never get to appreciate it before they take over the nitty-gritty of what constitutes this. As a result, when they get exposed to it, they think it’s too complex and sophisticated for them. They will rather stick to politics and agitate for political freedom without any meaningful change when it comes to economic aspects.

JS But the most important thing in the life of a political party has to be the relationship between the people they represent and the economy?

JM Yes, yes. They’ve failed. They’ve failed to appreciate what the people want in terms of economic change and they’ve not adapted to that type of a scenario to go beyond political liberation into economic emancipation.

Mokaba used to warn that you either adapt or die. Listen to their language – they try to speak very hard now because of EFF and all that, and in a way acknowledging that the EFF is the only organisation that raises the genuine demands of our people.

So I think that, if there will be such change in the next five years, it will be as a result of the existence of the EFF, which continues to put pressure on the ruling party to either adapt and start articulating the demands of the people or die a natural death.

So the EFF would have a contribution whether it’s in government or outside government through its existence. Whoever is in government would have the pressure to implement what EFF stands for.

JS Predictions are obviously full of flaws, but some analysts are suggesting that the most the EFF could get in the upcoming national election would be seven per cent. That would, in any case, give you at least 28 seats, but you’re obviously far more ambitious than that.

What do you think is honestly possible, and what are the most difficult aspects of campaigning, because I would imagine some provinces are much more challenging than others. We may have a sense that North West now belongs to the EFF and that has to do with a weak ANC leadership, your response to the Marikana massacre and so on, but would it be a little more difficult in David Mabuza’s Mpumalanga?

What do you foresee?

JM Look, you need to first start by asking a question: how much did COPE get in 2009? They got 13 seats and they got 1.3 million votes and if you look at how COPE was formed, and who formed COPE, and what type of support did they have on the ground, what does the EFF have and what structures does the EFF have?

COPE didn’t start by building structures. It was just an organisation that was running all over and saying all sorts of things and enjoying the privilege of being covered by the SABC, unlike the EFF, which has got structures in almost all the regions of South Africa, EFF which has got membership, EFF that comes with a leadership which is youthful, energetic and it’s not sleeping, and in areas where EFF actually converts Youth League structures into EFF structures.

So, if COPE had 30 seats without having had this machinery on the ground, it can’t be less than what COPE got, so the flaw of that prediction is immediately exposed.

For me to get seven per cent even before I start campaigning, I’m very happy, because I start somewhere. I’ve not done any campaigning, nothing … those predictions were in November, if you’re talking about the November research, we’ve not rushed our manifesto. We’ve not put up any posters anywhere. We’ve not done rallies anywhere, except the launching rally and all that, and already we’ve got a pocketed seven per cent. What’s going to happen when we start campaigning? When we start having posters everywhere?

In KZN, people – they’re so difficult, they don’t know about us. We’re a new organisation. But once the people start knowing about us and what we represent, the exposure, then we know that the balance of forces will change.

It’s a very exciting year in our prediction. We’re not starting with 0, 1. We’re starting at seven per cent before the actual campaigning, so we’re likely to be a very powerful force.

And I want all opposition to increase. No opposition must lose a percentage. They must increase, with EFF increasing, and everybody increasing, that will mean the other side is reducing. And once we reduce them, they will be forced to eat humble pie and they will have to come to the table and do away with their arrogance.

We need to punish them for their arrogance. I feel we are going to do very well. I was actually shocked by Western Cape. We took a decision before we went on Christmas holidays. We said Western Cape is very weak. We need to go and reinforce there.

We were shocked when we arrived there, everywhere we went, we found people waiting in their numbers. In other areas, we just stop and start walking in the streets. People came out in their numbers, especially in the coloured areas. They came out and started raising their problems, so we are very happy.

And with the kind of a province like Western Cape, it’s people who are exposed to information. They can read. They can express themselves. Now when we go to pump them with the message … television, adverts, newspaper adverts, radio adverts, billboards, posters, merchandise all over, door to door, many rallies, I’m going to have a big impact, because we have it now just through word of mouth … Malema is coming. Malema is coming. Malema is coming …

The hall gets packed. There’s never been a scenario where we addressed empty chairs since the formation of EFF … such is the response.

What about the future? What about when we start collecting resources, because people look at whether there is potential, and the EFF is shaping out nicely. You can associate with it. You can be part of it because of how it grows.

I think we will do very well and we’ve got a potential to go [further], post 2014.

JS What is the EFF without Julius?

JM It has got a life of its own.

JS Obviously you have to accept to some extent, even if it’s not about arrogance, it’s about a central truth—

JM No, no. I accept that I’m playing a role and I’m playing a leading role, and I accept that I’m the face of the Economic Freedom Fighters. But many people thought the ANC would die when Madiba left us and all those things. And it’s still there today, and that applies to the EFF.

There are many cadres of our revolution who come with a lot of massive experience, a lot of qualifications for leadership, including academic qualification, which is very important.

People like Floyd, like Dali. People like Robben Islanders, people from exile, Andile, Mbuyiseni and all that … Maggie Moonsamy … and you look at the cream. It reminds you of OR Tambo’s cabinet in Lusaka. It reminds you of the type of cream that worked with Tambo: Mbeki, Ramatlhodi, Joel Netshitenzhe, those are the type of people we have in the Economic Freedom Fighters, and therefore it will have a life even beyond Julius Malema.

JS Is that something you’re setting out to do … to attract real talent? For example, when you talk about Wikus Kotze, immediately people say this is a disaffected ex-right-winger who has lost his mind.

In fact, he’s not. He was the accountant for the Ekurhuleni Municipality. He’s somebody who’s been part of ANC structures for years. What’s your ideal recruit?

JM First, we don’t recruit people. People join. Because recruiting can cause a serious battle in the organisation, because in the process of recruitment, you make certain commitments, and where you are unable to meet them, people become disillusioned and disappointed and start leaving the organisation, and make certain utterance. So we don’t recruit people. They come voluntarily.

The best of the best that you’ll see amongst us are attracted by our policy. By what we’re advocating, by the levels of energy we display, the kind of commitment we show towards this programme we are advancing. That’s what makes people interested.

It’s not like we go all out to recruit the best of the best and we are happy that we have the best. There are people who claim they fought against boers, but when you look at their characters, there’s nothing to show they could have stood the test of time, including the torture that came with participating in the struggle.

So we are selling to our people the best the society could produce. The same would apply when we unveil our premier candidates. We don’t want our people to vote for ghosts, and when they give us a province, they get a shock of their lives because people vote twice.

They should know what else is there for them, so you will see that we mean business.

We mean to bring to an end to the celebration of uselessness and introduce a programme that is going to change people’s lives.

JS Are you particularly worried about any province? We speak about Mpumalanga—

JM Look, if there’s going to be any province that must be won, it’s Mpumalanga, given the highest levels of protest which characterise Zuma’s government from 2009, since Mabuza became premier … the most corrupt premier … and he’s not touched because he enjoys protection.⁸

So if there’s a province in which we must perform well, it’s Mpumalanga.

There is potential.

I’m just from there now. I’ve been to almost six, seven places in my short stay and I was more than happy with what I saw, and Lydenburg in particular, Mashishini … the people are so welcoming.

So you need to know your strength.

I’m saying once we start a campaign and people begin to see us right in their postboxes, when they get leaflets about our message – it’s going to be a walkover.

Remember we’re not fighting against the best in the ANC. We’re fighting against the weakest leadership ever in the history of the movement.

The only thing which is strong is the track record and the history of the ANC, which is very difficult for people to leave.

You know, brand is a very difficult thing.

So, ja, we are a new party. People will have doubts. People doubt new ideas. New ideas get ridiculed. But depending on how the leadership and those who are advocating those ideas respond to ridicule and show character and determination and resilience, people will say, wait a minute, it looks like it’s no joke. This is a serious thing. Let’s listen, even if we don’t follow them, let’s listen.

And they will make a mistake by offering an ear, because that’s how they are going to be won over, and that’s what we intend to do.

Mpumalanga is a hub of corruption and Limpopo was painted as such a province when we were there and Cassel [Mathale] and them.

It was a deliberate distortion of reality because they wanted to discredit us and paint us as the most corrupt province. I mean, Limpopo kept on winning awards from one department to the other because of good performance under Cassel.

One of the departments which performed very well was housing which was led by a very close friend of mine, Clifford Motsepe … a former member of the NEC which I served with … Clean audit for the first time, that department, since 1994, for the first time, three or four departments getting clean audits was under Cassel’s leadership.

And one morning you wake up and are told this province is the most corrupt without even scientific evidence or a report from AG.⁹

Why? Because Zuma thought that the resources to ‘decampaign’ him will come from Limpopo and had to use the word corruption to discredit that leadership and close the so-called tap for potential threat.

And he successfully did that, helped by Pravin [Gordhan], who is a master of factional politics. Pravin is known for division in the history of the ANC and the history of UDF.¹⁰ He’s a manipulator…

Things worsened after Cassel was put under administration. No ambulances. No books. If you probe the story of the books, then the people who got the tender are Zuma’s friends, are Zuma’s financiers.

So, it had nothing to do with corruption.

It was a political stance against the leadership of Cassel Mathale and Julius Malema who they suspected were using state resources to finance an anti-Zuma campaign.

There was never a plot. Those comrades were never even part of this, but some ended up buying into the Zuma agenda, threatened by the collective about having exclusive control. People were dying in hospitals, schools were running out of books. For me this was very clear. It was a political game.

Till today, I’m the only one who’s [been] arrested. A hub of corruption, intervention by central government, ‘taking over departments, and no one is arrested’.

These people, by the way, are corrupt. This is the capital of corruption. Their interventions have not helped. Many businesses have had to close.

Julius Malema, who has never worked for government, who has never sat in any tender committee, doesn’t know how those things work, he’s the one who is arrested for having stolen the tenders of Limpopo.

None of those people who were officially presiding over those tenders are arrested, till today, and you want to tell me it’s a genuine anti-corruption stance?

It was a political move to discredit Julius. It was a political move to close the so-called resources which were going to be used against Zuma in Mangaung.

JS This is a robustly controversial area. We might as well get to that point because Limpopo became the focus. But your detractors will say that these issues which played out in the media over two, three years – how did you accumulate the kind of money which allowed you to own two homes and a farm, a nice car, the famed watch which I see you don’t have on?

These legends grew around you that you were an extraordinarily wealthy man and there wasn’t an explanation for how that happened.

JM My first house in Polokwane, in Flora Park … I bought it through the stand I bought in Sterkpark. I bought that land in Sterkpark through Nedbank which financed that bond, and then after two years, I bought that for 190-something-rand, and after two years, the valuation of that land was 600 and something, and then I sold that land.

I bought the house in Flora Park, and then the second house in Sandton was bought by comrades for me – Cassel, Matome Hlabioa … all of them.

When I became the president of the Youth League, I rented a house, and they said, no, we need to contribute. Get a house in Sandton.

We bought a house in Sandton, and then they were all now starting to come and sleep in that house. Premiers, MECs, mayors, all types of people … business friends I had.

Then one day they took a decision that we can’t be passing each other on the corridors with towels as leadership. We need to build a proper structure here, and they all started contributing to the building of a structure in Sandton.

It was too uncomfortable in hotels. These were very senior business people – ministers, deputy ministers, who, when they were in Jo’burg, wanted to see the president of the Youth League. This is how it was. Now some, whose bonds we paid, whose school fees we paid when they could not, are being loud-mouthed.

I even said at the time, if I was to die, this house, I’ll donate it to the ANC and it can be used as a lodge for comrades, especially those coming from Polokwane. Because it’s not my house.

My name was used first to obtain the bond, the second bond from Absa, because I was earning a salary, and comrades contributed to get the deposit for me to qualify for a bond so we can build a home for comrades.

That’s how Peter Mokaba’s house was bought. It’s always been like that because they all come and sleep there and settle there and do all sorts of things there. That’s how the house in Sandton was bought.

The farm was not my farm. It was a company farm. I never had a farm under my name. That company had businesses which I was involved in through my family trust called Ratanang Family Trust. I was a shareholder through the trust in Guilder Investments.

Guilder Investment owned subsidiaries like On Point, SGL, Gwama Properties and all that.

Now, I wanted to buy the farm and I couldn’t raise sufficient money to buy the farm. Why did I want to buy the farm? We were going to the Youth League conference and I was preparing my life beyond the position of president of the Youth League.

In case the comrades say, ‘You’re released’, I should have something to do back at home.

I fell in love with agriculture and I developed an ambition for farming. But when I couldn’t raise the money, I went to the company and said, I’ve identified a farm and I could raise some money, but I couldn’t raise all the guarantees. Can you help me buy the farm?

They said to me, instead of helping you to buy the farm, we’ll rather buy the farm as a company to grow the property porfolio of the company, and it put the company at a better level so that it could even get loans for the future if it gets bigger jobs to do.

Then I said, my money, because I’ve already paid something for it? They said, whether that money is in your name or in the name of the company, it’s the same. This is your investment. You’ll get your money back through your dividends and all sorts of things.

Then I surrendered the money that I’ve put into that farm, and the company took over and then completed the transaction. However, that farm was exclusively used for me because I was interested in farming. The company was interested in growing its property portfolio.

We all stood to benefit and I didn’t have a problem with that type of a transaction. So, there was never too much money in my life. There was never too much money in my bank account. There was sufficient support coming from all these places.

All that I’m telling you, SARS knows it. The people I have mentioned, I’ve mentioned in the SARS papers. They were given forms by SARS to declare these monies as donations.

They’ve paid donation tax on those monies. I bought the house in Sandton and all that. But SARS cannot leave, even when people say, we take this portion, that’s our portion, we accept responsibility. We’ll pay the tax on those things.

SARS still wants me to pay on top of the donation taxes paid by all those who contributed to the house in Sandton.

The Breitling watch … I never bought a watch all my life. To be a president of the Youth League is very nice. You get all sorts of gifts from all sorts of people.

The first expensive watch I received was from a friend of mine who is well off and that was a Patek Philippe and then from there, I got those types of gifts from different types of people. So I didn’t need money to go buy a watch.

I used to drive a Range Rover. It was never mine. It was a Range Rover belonging to Matome, who had adopted me like his son because he was impressed by my leadership style and the type of things I am fighting for. Till today, me and that guy who gave me the Range Rover, we are still very close.

He’s treated me like one of his own and he goes all out to try and play that father figure role in my life.

So, I was involved in business and I did get a tender from the transport department and from several municipalities, but I was not involved in day-to-day running of the businesses.

I was never a director. Neither was I a manager. I was just a shareholder through the family trust. I couldn’t have played any role in influencing where that tender goes to because I never used to go and negotiate tenders on behalf of our company.

No one till today from government can stand up and say I was instructed by Julius Malema to give a tender to this one or that one. I’ve never played that role.

Even Thuli Madonsela’s investigation doesn’t point at me abusing my power to influence the direction of tenders.

The only fault done by me was in receiving the money which was obtained through a company tender which was obtained illegally. How could I have known that this tender was obtained illegally? Because I’m not involved.

There are many other tenders that the company got. They’ve never had problems. So if it’s illegal money I’ve received in the form of dividends, it means the staffers as well received illegal money in the form of salaries, it means the ANC has, as well, received illegal money in the form of donations.

All those are not charged for having received illegal money, but I am the only one who is charged, and I must believe that, no, it’s justice, it’s anti-corruption, this is fair and all that.

Like staff members, I didn’t know where the money came from except to know that the company was doing very well at getting different jobs both in the private and public sector.

JS So when you look back, would you have done something different? You’ve said that when you were in the ANC Youth League, you had people offering you things all the time.

JM Yes, a lot.

JS Would you behave differently now with this knowledge? Would you accept gifts? Would you perhaps be more circumspect around that kind of thing knowing that there’s a chance that people can take that and use it against you?

JM No, Janet. I’m not arrested for receiving gifts. I’m not. I’m not arrested. Mandela received gifts, all of them. Zuma is number one with receiving gifts. Politicians are supported everywhere else.

It would be wrong for me to create an impression that I would be this political figure and not get any form of assistance. Then I am going to falter in that regard.

I am the victim of a political onslaught. All of them have received gifts. All of them. All of them are doing business. Tokyo. Mathews [Phosa]. Cyril. All of them. None of them has been accused of using his influence to get a tender.

Why me? Why do I get isolated like that? What did I do? The only crime I did was to stop supporting Jacob Zuma. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any problem. There was nothing I did which politicians don’t do.

The South African politicians are involved in receiving gifts.

I’m not arrested for wearing a Breitling watch, but I decided to throw it away because it was a distraction. Instead of people focusing on your face, they focus on your watch because they want to be distracted. So don’t give them anything distracting.

But there’s nothing wrong with receiving gifts. When we’re in Parliament, we’ll declare them. We’ll comply with the law.

There’s nothing I regret doing. Nothing at all. People just manipulated the system. SARS, the same thing. SARS knows very well where the money comes from. SARS didn’t open criminal charges against me for tax evasion. Nothing like that, because they don’t have a case against me on those things, except to say you have not complied with declaring these amounts. All those amounts combined are R4-million.

R4-million, I’ve said to them, I’ll pay R4-million. So they put R4-million with a 50% penalty, 200% interest – R16-million.

I said I can pay the primary debt. It’s done every day. It’s SARS. They reach deals every day.

They refused. They took my properties. They sold them. They still are not ready to come and say, Mr Malema, now that we’ve sold your properties, this is how much we’ve collected, therefore how much can you give us as the difference? Because SARS should be able to help us comply.

SARS, especially when it comes to the young ones, it shouldn’t be used as a tool to destroy them young.

I might have faltered in complying with certain tax regulations. I admit I had very little knowledge about how those things work and all that. I said to SARS, please help me to comply so that I can lead by example and encourage other young people to comply with SARS.

So I have no problem with paying taxes. The taxes must be paid. But let SARS not be used to destroy people. SARS should not be the one to close businesses of black young people, to close down black families and destroy them.

We are new in these things of complying. We come from extremely poverty-stricken families where there’s no one in the family with such exposure and knowledge so you would have all the reasons to blame us.

I was listening to one of the EFF fighters saying, no, but my employer pays tax for me, and that was my understanding for some time.

Every little cent that goes in you have to be accountable for.

Fair enough. I accept. Can I be pardoned? And then allow me to pay the primary debt, perhaps with 50% penalty.

Acknowledge that you have to dig deep. You can’t just move as if nothing has happened. Let me pay.

There was a guy who came for me and said, I’m ready to pay R4-million upfront, and I phoned SARS and said this guy is willing to help, but on condition after paying the R4-million the whole thing gets scrapped and we start off afresh on a zero-zero budget, but they couldn’t budge.

Because it’s Julius, I must take his personal resources, his business resources. I must destroy him so that he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He can’t be a potential threat.

It didn’t happen. Actually it threw numbers to Julius Malema’s side because people pay SARS every day, but not me.

What type of an attitude is this one? They come and share their personal stories, the lawyers, the accountants who’ve been in that field for more than 30 years. They say, we have never seen anything like this, and not only to me but to SARS.

What is this? It’s a political agenda and it’s unfortunate how SARS gets to be used like that. So, let’s see what happens because properties have been sold. We wait until we’ve been told how much has been collected, but we must talk whether they like it or not.

We can kill each other in public but we’ll still have to come together. I’m a taxpayer. They’re a tax collector. We’ll still have to sit down and see how do we move forward.

Is SARS a tool to destroy people? The Afrikaners, they dominate at SARS. There are Afrikaners there who are using SARS to promote Afrikaner business and to suppress African majority’s business. They’re there. We know their names.

There’ve been insults for far too long. Some of them were Special Branch policemen who are now integrated into the compliance section of SARS and all those things. Are we really dealing with SARS or are we dealing with people who are suffering from a hangover of apartheid and anything else that seems to be representing an agenda to liberate the African majority against white supremacy?

They see it as separate and want to attack it.

I really don’t know, but I don’t get threatened or worried because at least I know for a fact that they are not looking for tax. They’re looking for something else. If it was tax, I’d have been genuinely worried and say, let me try and resolve this and all that. The tax I’ve tried to resolve, they can’t meet me halfway because it’s not about tax. I am scared of sequestration, because you can’t go to Parliament, you can’t have a cheque account and so on. The fear is not only on personal credibility and legitimacy.

It’s about an inability to take out a loan even and provide shelter for my son.

But I would continue. I would do it from here, at the EFF offices, from where I would continue activism, working in the squatter camps and so on.

JS So this is clearly an issue you’re going to let go of? You will pursue this?

JM We’re not finished with SARS. It’s still on. We’re still fighting. We’re still trying to find each other. But what I’ve tried to do is to be compliant to declare my empty incomes, an asset-free man every year, and see how I get evaluated.

Remember the disputed one is a five-year assessment. But moving forward, we need to comply.

I don’t allow this dispute to affect me. I’ve learned my lesson. In subsequent years – compliant.

JS So as you sit here now, what are you worth?

JM [Laughs]

JS What do you have? What do you still have?

JM I have nothing. Absolutely nothing. I think if they had their way they would have taken my clothes. I would be walking naked. They’ve taken everything.

There was a day they came to my house, a cousin of mine came coincidentally at the same time, and SARS was there moving furniture. And the wife of my cousin was crying. She asked: What is this? How are they able to do this to a human being? But for me it was like, whatever.

This is what ‘struggle’ means. It means losing personal belongings. It means losing life. It means being imprisoned.

Our enemies will use all different kinds of attack to undermine.

So I don’t have a car. I don’t have a house. I don’t have anything. I don’t have a consistent reliable income. I’m a man who just walks out completely like this. That’s me and the world. There’s nothing left, but I’m very rich because I’ve got people around me.

You can have all the money on top there but if you haven’t got people, life can be so boring.

You can’t even see that this man is suffering because of the number of people who are next to me.

That is wealth. I’ve got human capital. We’re enjoying life. We learnt our lessons and we’ll do things better tomorrow and we should be grateful about still being alive.

They’ve not killed us. That presents us with an opportunity to correct the past and create a very good and brighter future for our children. I’m happy that it happened at a time when my child was very young and did not get to see this type of thing. It would have been very traumatic and affected him in a way at school.

So he’s doing Grade 2 now. Last year, he did very well and got an A in mathematics last year in Grade 1, meaning he doesn’t see all this. He’s enjoying life and that’s what we must do as parents. Try to protect them from these struggles that we’re waging on a daily basis.

That’s what matters to me. The things that I love in my life are still there. My son is there. You can’t expropriate him without compensation. My grandmother can’t be expropriated. My political beliefs can’t be expropriated, so I’m still complete.

That’s what matters. I still have life, and my family house at least has got a spare room for me so I can always go and sleep there – something that I avoid doing because it should be very painful actually for a parent to know that this child used to have all these things and now he’s sharing a house with me.

So I try stay at cousins’ places to avoid inflicting that pain on my grandmother. When she will see me, she will pretend to be strong. That’s what parents do. Every time she sees me roaming around looking for bread and all that, she’ll be like, you know, what they did to this young man is very bad.

So we avoid that by crashing at those who do not mind having you around.

The support of my cousins has been so amazing. Actually there has been a huge contestation. Where must I sleep? Where must I go and stay, and I’ll get accused of having spent too much time with that side by this side.

JS It’s been interesting that throughout this period, while there might have been scandals that developed around money and so on, you have not been attached to relationships that went wrong.

Ratanang’s mother has never spoken out, for instance, so your personal life has essentially remained quite private. Is that largely because there is nothing to tell?

JM [Laughs]

JS Or do you think that you might have made mistakes? We don’t have a picture of Julius who has made enormous mistakes in his personal life.

JM Look, the financial part of my life would not have been known if it were not for the recklessness of SARS which wanted to take me to court and leak to the papers.

So I don’t think that even that part would have been known because I’ve always conducted myself in a manner that such things remained private and I’ve kept my family very far from the media, starting with my grandmother.

Many others wanted to interview her. I’ve always refused because I don’t want her to be in that type of a limelight. They’ve chosen their life, they’ve lived it. This is my life and I’m not compromising.

The same thing with my son, so there shouldn’t be confusion about who is the focus point here.

I think that the blunder I committed, it was to separate with Ratanang’s mother because, really, from her side, there was never serious contestation or serious confrontation or problems. So I think that should have been handled differently.

But you know, things happen and we have to move on with our lives.

She has moved on. She’s married now and with her husband, but me and her remain very good friends. We speak about the child and I am responsible for my son and I contribute to his upbringing.

I think now recently there is a protest that, since the schools have opened, I have not taken him to school.

He called when I was in Mpumalanga and I said I’ll make time next week to come and take you to school. That’s how close we are.

The mistakes we have made in life and many of those mistakes were made, some of us we made those mistakes because we didn’t have a solid family foundation which would ordinarily have taught you how issues of family, men and all that are handled.

I didn’t have a father figure to look up to, to inspire me as to how to take care of relationships.

The rest, we learned off the streets, we learned from senior leaders of the ANC. So I think if we had such foundation we would have dealt with issues differently, because part of my commitment, which I betrayed, was that any woman I am going to make pregnant, I’m going to marry her because I don’t want a situation which happened between me, my mother and my father where a son grows up without a presence of the father.

Having separated with the mother of that child, that father figure presence is always there and when it becomes troublesome, they tell him that, we’re going to tell your father, and he changes his conduct because he knows in his life the presence of a man called his father.

My child uses my surname, which gives me all the right to be a reliable parent.

And it’s fair to say mistakes were committed, but we try to help them in a very, very disciplined way. I try to have friendships with women that I get involved with, and even beyond separation, we remain friends. How any girlfriend or ex-girlfriend of mine can declare me an enemy … I don’t want to talk to her anymore. because it would have been out of serious engagement that it’s not working out between us and therefore we need to find a way of separating without declaring each other enemy.

I don’t do the groupies. I don’t like it.

JS Do they exist?

JM I don’t regard women as groupies and all those things.

I think that when you are being appreciated as political leadership, you shouldn’t confuse that. Groupies are for celebrities and I’m not in that space of celebrity. I want to be known as a political leader, as a political figure. I’m not a celebrity.

And when people come and follow you, want pictures with you and want a photograph and want to chat to you, you shouldn’t see that as flirting. It must never be misinterpreted as flirting and for being a man in love with girls … No, no.

You should see that as appreciation of your leadership and humble yourself, and those who come with such intentions, me being a political figure, sometimes that comes with a little bit of paranoia. You become very suspicious about why are they making such different signs and immediately you want to disengage.

I think there were enemies out looking for me. If I committed such stupid mistakes, they would have destroyed me. But it doesn’t mean that there are no women that when I see, I feel like, Hello! And have a drink.

I do have my moments. I enjoy the company of beautiful women, because all women, by the way, are beautiful. I’m young. I’m not married. I’m looking. I’m looking for a reliable partner.

My grandmother always uses different tricks to try and get me to get married. She was saying to me now that people are saying you must leave the ANC to vote EFF, but how do we put you on a position if you are not married? You can’t vote for people who are not married. You have to get married before you get elected.

That’s trying to put pressure because, before this one, it was: “If I die, I want to see you with a woman.” So it’s always like that. But I’m still very young. I don’t want to compromise people in the process where they get into a marriage and they end up being married to the houses they stay in without a husband who runs all over.

I want to be that type of a husband who’s present. The type of a husband who receives the wife when she comes home and listens to her stories and hears about people who are troubling her and making her unhappy at work … Getting to know those people even before you meet them. And sit there and appreciate the smell of a good meal being prepared with love and children running around.

If it was my way, I would want to have lots of children because we should be able to have kids and love them and provide for them, but the economic situation may restrict us … because it becomes expensive.

And that’s me. I want a good woman who is qualified, beautiful, tall, not very big. Not that I discriminate against the big ones – and she must be articulate. I don’t want to be told about Kardashians permanently in my house. There should be issues of substance that get to be debated. I must be taken on, on some of the policy pronouncements we’re making. How such would not work and how such would work and that type of a conversation at home. That can make a very good family.

It remains a wish because you may never know. You may fall in love with a different kind and the whole concept just collapses because falling in love is not like making it through to Christmas Day which is there, guaranteed that it will come.

JS And chemistry is unpredictable.

JM You know! We fall in love with different kinds. That’s how complex the issues of love are and you can’t spend too much time trying to understand them. You must go with the flow. That’s what is going to make you happy.

I haven’t met such chemistry. There hasn’t been much.

JS I hope your grandmother gets to see you in this role.

JM By not getting married, I’ll keep her alive. She’ll live long waiting for that to happen because my suspicion is that, when I get married, she’s going to die and say, ‘No, mission accomplished.’ I’m still enjoying her presence and still learning a lot from her as a woman in my life.

JS What happened with Kenny Kunene?

JM Kenny came to join us and we welcomed him, but as we were proceeding, others became uncomfortable.

There’s no bad blood. When we meet, we talk.

He came, he saw, he left. Even now there’s no problem.

He’s a very active person. He works very hard if he believes in a cause. If you’re looking for someone to deploy, he’s always there.

JS Let’s look at the battle in KZN. I think it was very interesting the way in which Zanele Magwaza-Msibi responded. She was extremely angry. She felt that you’d conned Buthelezi when you met with him and later had a press conference about co-operating with the IFP during the elections and putting the past behind you.

She suggested that he’s an old man and you’d used him because it’s very difficult to get into IFP strongholds, and here you had secured that. But then a very interesting story emerged earlier this year that suggested even Zuma did not have as much control in KZN as we imagine, that some regional leaders are vacillating and they’re not entirely sure which way to go.

Every South African, when asked what is going to be your biggest challenge, would surely say KZN. How do you feel about that? Was it a good idea for you to engage with Buthelezi like this, and did it really come from the heart?

Obviously there was a political side to it. I doubt that you didn’t express that strategy to him.

JM No, the political strategy is to expose the organisation to parties that have been in the political field for quite some time and also to introduce it to the elders. If I had a way, it would be Buthelezi. It would be Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It would be Ma Mbeki, the mother of President Mbeki, and President Mbeki himself. Just to express how I feel about the country and how we think we have been let down and to get to hear them sharing their experiences and their expectations of democracy.

And that was the genuine agenda when we went to see the IFP leader. We were also looking for that type of a relationship and protection in places like KZN where the ANC has become so violent and politically intolerant. And we felt that the IFP has been around there. They understand what’s happening.

We didn’t only meet the IFP president. We met the whole executive. So Magwaza, I don’t think she knows what she’s talking about because they are extremely young, including the leader of the Youth Brigade of the IFP who was in that meeting. So if she uses the age of the president to want to undermine the type of engagement we had, that would be disingenuous. They are much younger than her and very articulate.

We had a two-hour meeting and engaged on all types of political questions, including on ideological questions, and how we can actually make South Africa better. We looked at how things have worked in other countries… Nyerere, Ujamaa, all that … we engaged them on that. So it was not just about Julius and Buthelezi. It was far beyond that type of simplicity.

And only to find that we’re agreeing on expropriation of the land, except that they’re saying it must be compensation. We’re saying there shouldn’t be compensation.

But laying the foundation and basis of engagement, we are agreeing on some things and we may disagree on this or that. We thought it was, you know, a very successful and useful meeting. We’re meeting different formations because the mistake political parties do, after forming the organisation, they just hit the ground running without talking to the players that have been there before to appreciate how does this terrain look like. Look at Holomisa, when he spoke at our rally—

JS When he walked in on the day of your launch [at Marikana], I was surprised to see him. I spoke to him directly afterwards and he was very positive.

JM But look at what he says about the IEC, the SABC – such an enormous and rich experience. This is what we are coming to experience. He warned us in Marikana and then things happened the same way that he said they were going to happen.

Had we not received such a warning from an elder, we would be surprised. We’d be frustrated and we’d be moaning. We’re not being covered. But when he sees us, he says, welcome. And then when you see these things happening, you won’t get shocked. You are not troubled by them. You are forewarned by the experience of elders.

That’s the importance of doing these rounds. You come to appreciate where these people come from. Where does the terrain come from and what is to be expected. And that is being African, for the elderly to shape the younger ones, for the young ones must appreciate the experience so they use the experience to chart a way forward.

JS Let’s return to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Now, you have said your relationship with her is certainly not about getting her to join the EFF. Of course, if you were to announce that she had joined the EFF, this would be a huge thing in South African society.

JM Yes, yes.

JS There’s a great deal of trust still placed in her as a reservoir of knowledge, as a figure of enormous strength. Is it still something you would like to see happen, her joining the EFF, or is that not what this is about.

JM I think she’s better off in the ANC. We’ll be expecting a lot from her. It’s like asking your grandmother to fight for divorce, it would be shocking. For what? After so many years? She would rather die in there.

It teaches us, actually, to be loyal to our organisations as the young kids. Especially as we grow into these organisations and become the veterans of such organisations. So I think she’s fine. If it was out of her own wish and will, you can’t undermine it, but we are not going to be the ones to take an initiative to try and recruit Winnie. Actually that would be equal to undermining Winnie and we don’t want to be seen to be undermining Winnie.

JS You must have appreciated her support because she was very vocal around how she felt you were being treated and so on. You must have had a sense that you at least weren’t lonely in that structure. You had somebody very important who batted for you.

JM Ah. Me and Winnie, it has been like that, she has been coming, covering me, for quite some time. I remember when we marched here in Johannesburg [laughs], eh, the police were looking for us—

JS Was this the COSAS march?

JM Yes, yes, and we ran to her house to say, eh, now it’s difficult. And she took us to the police station, saying, Ja, you, you’re not listening … I’m taking you to the police station. She took us there, there they charged us and all those things, and when they were supposed to lock us up, eh, she fought and said, no I didn’t bring them here for you to lock them up. They have messed up. Charge them. Let them be released on warning and I will take care of them and they will come to court.

And they did exactly that and we then went to convene the hawkers’ organisation. We had a meeting with all those people because cars were damaged. They all came. Mama came. And when we’re there, we convinced all those people to drop cases. And they did. Hawkers dropped cases. And then the state withdrew the charges against us.

JS That was a very difficult day, Julius. You must have, at some point, become terrified.

JM It was, yes.

JS Did you feel that it was getting out of control, and did you honestly not know what to do?

JM That’s why we ran to her. We felt there must be an elder with some experience to help us with this type of situation. And the imagination of a village boy being arrested in Hillbrow Police Station. It was traumatic, but Mama helped very well.

We were there with her when she was accused of fraud and all those things. And she came to the ANC DC and warned me. But Winnie has been like that.

Even when we went to Polokwane, she warned us. She said, the levels of divisions are going to put us into a permanent crisis. Let’s allow Thabo and Jacob to continue in their positions until we find a solution after and beyond this crisis. And from there, I ran away. I was no longer interested to talk to her because she was advocating for something different. And later on, we came to appreciate that she was correct.

Had we allowed that cooling off period, perhaps it would have brought some different reasoning.

JS Hence your impetus now to have the wisdom of the elders. That was obviously a very important lesson.

JM And she went to warn the ANC when they were trying us in the DC. And she came there, she said, no, I’m not here to do anything, and I’m not here to justify whether the young boys are correct or not. I’m here to tell you that thinking of expulsion or suspension is not an option. They are doing what they are doing because we as elders have failed and we must take responsibility and teach them correct politics, if there are such things as correct politics.

But on Botswana, on the land, she said, ‘All these things, we have said, them as the ANC, they learned them from us.’ And you can’t now turn around and charge them, and I’m warning that if you expel these people, you are going to create a problem for the ANC.

She came to speak. No one asked her questions because of how she spoke to the whole meeting. We were all, like, we can’t respond to her. Not even Derek Hanekom. No one. She actually took them through.

She said, I know almost all presidents of the ANC. Since the formation of the Youth League, none of the presidents has ever been comfortable with the utterances of the Youth League, including Dr Xuma. She said, Xuma came to my house, looking for Mandela. He was screaming, angry, and when he couldn’t find him, he said to me, you must tell Mandela and Sisulu that the ANC doesn’t belong to them.

Angry as he was, as much as he was disturbed by the activities of the Youth League, he never ever thought of expelling them from the ANC.

That’s Winnie for you and we are privileged to have had an opportunity to have learned from that kind of leadership. That calibre of leadership is very inspirational. They’ve got a foresight. They operate as prophets. They can see it coming. They can tell you, take this or that step. This is where you’re going to land up.

Exactly all her predictions were correct. Not because she’s a prophet but because she’s got an experience. And many of these others want to undermine her experience and they don’t listen.

JS In terms of Mbeki, another reason why Zuma and you became alienated was Mbeki, and that relates to their own history. Do you have a sense of a role that Mbeki can play in the life of the EFF, even at an intellectual level among yourselves? Or do you simply regard him as a great force in the ANC upon whom you can model certain aspects of your leadership?

Why do you champion Mbeki, and why did you champion Mbeki, knowing that this would get you into a lot of trouble?

JM We need to have elders as a country. People to look up to who you can always bounce our ideas off, and for President Mbeki to say, he’s not going to be involved in South African politics. For me, that was wrong. I think that we need to start identifying such individuals. Mbeki, Winnie, Desmond Tutu, Prince Buthelezi and bring them together and form a council of elders which will not have any executive powers, but as an advisory body to express themselves.

Why are they able to express themselves? Because they are no longer looking for anything. Because they are moving straight into their next life. They’re done. They’ve played their role. And many people have mistaken our call for President Mbeki’s recall to feel hatred against him.

No. We’ve never hated President Mbeki. We’ve always admired him, and even his levels of articulation and understanding of theory and his intellectual capacity to relate to issues, it was very amazing.

We may disagree with him about neo-liberal policies, privatisation, policies that seek to impress the market forces, but he’s one of the best. We think that he still has got a role to play because a country must have its elders. He shouldn’t be a threat to anybody.

The only things that we disagreed with President Mbeki was third term because it was constituting a threat to our constitution. And that’s where we came from. Not because we hated him. The second thing, when we championed for his recall, President Mbeki and President Zuma were not talking to each other and the government was becoming more arrogant.

Remember, government charges Zuma. Immediately after being elected. They were planning whether he must be charged at the airport. It was like the State versus the ANC.

Hey, what are you doing? That’s what we were asking. What are you doing? Are you trying to create voter instability? This was going to plunge the country into a crisis. And we said there must be one circle of power because if there’s no urgent immediate intervention here, the country’s heading for a crisis. That’s why we came on recalling him. Not because he didn’t have capacity. Not because he was not this good leader.

People can learn this or that from him, and the older he becomes, the more sharper he becomes, you know, like a matured wine. We are now enjoying him more. We’re longing for his voice. We’re longing for his poetic speeches. We’re longing to hear something we don’t know because others they say everything that is being said by the people on the pavements. Nothing very different.

So, that uniqueness. We miss that. And desire to want to research more because the things that the president has said are actually beyond you, and you feel like reading more. You get some motivation to want to read, to be more equipped and to want to come to a level where, if President Mbeki gives me an opportunity to engage with him, I must be three steps ahead of him.

So, this is what we are celebrating. We’re celebrating brains, not mediocrity. Not dancing and singing. That can’t be life?

You can’t want to reduce a society to dancers and singers. Well and good. We do that when we are happy, but we need to produce a society that celebrates ideas, the mental capacity of a person to think and be innovative, and come with new ideas on how we can better society. That’s what we are celebrating.

And I didn’t know that President Zuma hates President Mbeki like that. He hates him with everything. He doesn’t want anyone to praise him. If you want to be wrong with Zuma, you must praise Mbeki. You can say, Mbeki’s dressed in a nice suit today … You’re going to be lectured on how you must be careful.

Before I led a campaign on the recall of President Mbeki, I had a discussion with Zuma. He made it very clear that he can’t work with Thabo and that Thabo must be removed, and we carried that mandate and we pushed it. We don’t regret that. We don’t at all because the situation would have been worse than what it was at that time had it continued for far too long.

The president of the ANC and the country are not talking to each other, that thing of standing up there to greet each other in Polokwane was a publicity stunt. They couldn’t do anything. They have to be seen to be. But the physical engagement and the seating arrangement will tell you that they’re not feeling each other.

And other people were becoming extremely arrogant in government and thinking they can pay a revenge through State institutions for having defeated Thabo in Polokwane and all those things. It was wrong. We had to put a stop and we’re happy we did that because after a transition, the country went back to its normality until the man took over and messed it up.

On his own, he messed it up. No one else messed it up. He messed it up.

JS What is the relationship with Vavi? What role is he going to play, not necessarily in the EFF but in a workers’ vanguard? Or do you think he’s been so damaged by the allegations against him that, in fact, it would complicate what must roll out now before the election?

JM I don’t think Vavi’s damaged. He will come back and play a leading role in the struggles of the working class. He’s loved by many of our people.

I think that we need to appreciate that individuals make mistakes. I don’t think that Vavi’s mistake is so damaging that he can’t bounce back.

What Vavi did, they all do it. The unions. Among the union leadership, it seems to have been an acceptable practice. Not all, but the majority of them sleep with their juniors, have kids with their juniors, they employ people unprocedurally because they’ve become a law unto themselves. There are no unions in the unions. You know?

Ja, so he was just going on with how they lived their lives. All of them. The problem was that Vavi continued with such things even when he realised he was in the spotlight and the enemy was out to get him. He should have been more cautious and perhaps stopped those things, and focused.

The credit card, the abuse of the credit card, it looks like it’s their daily bread. They do that, Madisha, all of them. People have got that history in the trade unions. There are dynamics in every union. Those dynamics have never destroyed any leader. So I think he’s got a role to play.

A workers’ party could play a very important role. We all have got a role to play in the politics of South Africa. There are even ex-convicts forming parties, they think they’ve got a role to play. So it’s worse for Vavi.

He’s got 99% chances of playing a role in South African politics and don’t write him off.

JS And NUMSA? This is an unfolding process.

JM Look, Vavi’s also got the background of COSAS. COSAS is a very, very strong organisation because it teaches people resilience at a very early age and it’s very difficult to break people who come from such a background.

They started politics at a very early age and they’ve seen it all. They’ve seen things happening even in areas where they thought they were destroyed, they still bounced back and still played a role, so that’s what builds, what gives him that character, and that’s why it would be wrong to write him off.

And NUMSA plays a very important role. Wonderful. We appreciate it.

I’ve seen something that they’re saying that our ideologies are different and all that. I don’t know, maybe somebody we still have to educate, because the majority of people who are contributing to the ideological orientation of NUMSA are people that contribute to the EFF’s ideological work as well, so there will never be such fundamental differences.

Well, they want to appear unique and all that. I don’t know for what, I really don’t know. But, you know, to form a union and to form a political party are two different things. They are extremely different. Union. You get people on a shop floor. They want to go to the same toilet with white people. Their demands are very simple. They want an increase. They are here.

Political formations – you have to move from village to village. Sometimes you arrive and you’ll not find anybody coming to your meeting and all that. It’s more complex than organising a union, so NUMSA, we don’t want to engage with them in public. We have to sit down and discuss what really are the ideological differences between us, because Irvin Jim acknowledges this political report that the founding manifesto of EFF has got very clear positions that are similar to those of NUMSA.

Expropriation of land, fight for socialism. Nationalisation. And then they come from the other side and they say, we are not very clear whether EFF is fighting for socialism or not. But our constitution articulates that very clearly, so it means that somebody has not been reading.

But also, such observations are made if parties are not talking to each other. If we were to talk to each other, we’ll actually appreciate that there’s no fundamental differences in terms of ideology. We may not be in the same struggle of personality cult and wanting Vavi at all costs and all sorts of things. Well and good, but ideologically, in terms of principle, we agree.

We agreed with NUMSA when we were in the youth league. COSATU will come this side. ANC will come this side. We come with the ANC delegation. We speak on issues. NUMSA and the Youth League will be moving from the same perspective. Gwede will even say: but you guys came with us but you speak like the other side.

It’s not about who we came with, it’s about issues we agree upon. So why and how it changes? It becomes different. I still want to be educated about that.

JS It’s a very interesting situation because now you have some talent in NEHAWU’s Fikile Majola, Sdumo Dlamini, and so on, possibly entering Parliament for the ANC, and then they’re lost to COSATU because the federation’s regulations say they have to resign if they become MPs. They must go. And then you wonder … how do agendas change, because if they are in Parliament now but no longer part of the structures, will they truly represent?

JM Ai, those ones. They’re going to be extremely rich now. I mean, they’ve already started it when they were still in the unions.

They must go to Parliament. They are the ones who are going to implement wage subsidy. They are the ones who are going to be defending labour brokers. That’s what that Parliament does.

Ah. Those ones, they must go. At least if they’re leaving COSATU maybe Jim will then capture COSATU. It’s an opportunity for those comrades to emerge in COSATU and reposition that divided institution around the workers’ struggles.

I think that it’s a blessing in disguise for Majola, the president of NUM. Sdumo – they must go. They must all go and the unions must remain in the safe hands of reliable fighters. Otherwise it will be the end of COSATU, just to continue with those comrades.

They’ve killed it. They’ve killed the Communist Party. And in COSATU, once they’ve done, they’ll unveil the tombstone for the ANC.

It’s dead.