EVEN AFTER THE DEJECTING EXPERIENCE that I went through with Blackwash and the September National Imbizo, I still wanted to believe that the pan-Africanist and Black Consciousness bloc was my political home. I wondered many a time if I was not misplaced in a bloc that seemed more obsessed with the perpetuation of apartheid nostalgia than with giving birth to new ideas that would provide solutions to the ongoing violence of black existence.
There were times when I sat on my own contemplating my political direction. During those times, thoughts of joining your party engulfed my mind. I would often take an A4 sheet of paper and divide it into two equal halves. On the one side I would write ‘Reasons to join the ANC’ and on the other ‘Reasons not to join the ANC’. The second side of the paper always had more points than the first, confirming to me that my politics were more reflective of the Black Consciousness and pan-Africanist school of thought than they were of the narrow nationalist ideological posture that I believed you reflected. I would thus talk myself out of the temptation of being part of the Congress Movement, encouraged by the words of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the former prime minister and, later, president of Ghana, who said, ‘The total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African Socialist Government must be the primary objective of all black revolutionaries throughout the world. It is an objective which, when achieved, will bring about the fulfilment of the aspirations of Africans and people of African descent everywhere. It will at the same time advance the triumph of the international socialist movement.’
I didn’t think that you espoused this, or that your orientation was the same. And yet somehow a part of me continued to harbour sentiments of my childhood growing up in a community loyal to the Congress Movement.
I decided that before I joined any organisation, I would conduct thorough research about it and only when I understood its policies and had gone through its discussion documents, I would join it. I was under the impression that by the end of this quest, I would have been swayed towards either the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, the Socialist Party of Azania or the Azanian People’s Organisation. If anyone had told me at this point that the organisation whose policies I would identify with was in the Congress Movement, I would have laughed at them.
It was while I was contemplating the direction that my political life would take that I found my attention captured by the then president of the African National Congress Youth League, comrade Julius Malema. I had been following his work with great fascination. He represented everything I believed the youth of this country should represent: a die-hard spirit and fearlessness that knew no limits. But it was when, under his leadership, the ANCYL championed the call for the nationalisation of mines that I began to have immense respect for comrade Malema. For the first time in a very long time, I found myself identifying with the politics of the ANCYL.
Not since the unprecedented recalling of former African National Congress and state president Mr Thabo Mbeki, had the country’s collective attention been as captured as it was by the ANC Youth League’s radical call for the nationalisation of mines. Those opposed to this call argued that nationalisation would serve the interests of capital by bailing out indebted capitalists who are losing profits as a result of the 2008 global financial recession. Those in support of this call saw it as a vehicle that will drive the country towards addressing the triple challenges of unemployment, poverty and unequal spatial development. There is also a portion of the population that supported the concept of nationalisation, albeit not as defined and proposed by the ANCYL. These people argued that if the method proposed by the ANCYL was employed, South Africa would ‘become another Zimbabwe’. This argument didn’t convince me, because I knew of countries, like Zambia, where it was the privatisation of mines, not their nationalisation, that had led to poverty and unemployment.
I belong to the bloc that supported the call for the nationalisation of mines and the expropriation of land without compensation. It had always irked me that we live in a country where a settler minority is holding an entire native population to ransom, keeping it in chains of economic bondage. Billions of rands were being made in our extractive economy. Minerals and other raw materials were profiting a few while many suffered the cruelty of poverty.
The land question is also one close to my heart. I find it atrocious that less than 10 per cent of the population controlled more than two-thirds of the land in a country where natives are subjected to RDP houses and concentration camps in the form of informal settlements. And to suggest that the government had to buy back this land is absurd to me. Nothing about our history made it correct that a black-led government should be exhausting resources on the purchasing of land that rightfully belonged to the people.
But I understood the complex dynamics behind the call by the ANC Youth League. I understood that because of centuries of being systematically ostracised from the political economy of land, black people are not prepared for radical land and agrarian reform. The reality of the situation is that owning land is not as romantic as land rights activists make it sound. It is not just about black families having hectares of land to themselves. It is also about the ability to sustain that land, to ensure productivity and maximise utilisation. It is also about ensuring that there is a market for whatever is being produced. Farming is not easy, or cheap. It demands a lot of resources and skills and expertise, which, unfortunately, most black people don’t have as a result of their not having grown up in an environment that nurtured a love for farming.
There are many white kids who grow up on farms or whose parents have farms they use as vacation homes. Their love for farming is a product of this socialisation. If you were to give someone like me, a person who grew up in Soweto and who knows nothing about farm life, a farm today, what exactly could I do with it? I’ve never spent any time on a farm and know almost nothing about farming.
We don’t have vegetable gardens in our townships; few homes even have flower gardens. Our yards are concrete and the closest thing to farming that we do is water the small grass patches we call gardens.
So I understood that the call for land expropriation, correct though it was, was more sentimental than pragmatic. But I supported it and I was willing to defend it, because it was a necessary discussion for our nation to enter into.
Despite my warming up to the radical shift in the politics of the Youth League, I was still very sceptical about joining it. But I admired the leadership of comrade Malema and knew that if there was ever a time for me to join your Congress Movement, this was it. The youth movement wouldn’t be as dynamic in a very long time as it was under comrade Malema. It had taken decades for the Youth League to arrive at a point of such militancy. This was a defining moment in the politics of our country, at least in so far as the role of the youth was concerned. The youth was agitating for something powerful beyond measure, and even if there was an element of naivety in the cause that was being fought, there was also an element of revolutionarism that demanded to be understood.
A few months after his unopposed re-election, the parameters of the demise of comrade Julius Malema were plotted, by himself and by you. Newspapers were bombarding us with stories about his possible suspension from the ANC Youth League following some ‘reckless’ statements that he had made about the sitting government of Botswana being a ‘puppet regime’ and a ‘footstool of imperialism’ on the African continent. Comrade Julius had dared to make the bold assertion that the Youth League would send a command team to assist opposition parties to remove the ruling party from office. From a diplomatic point of view, this was a big faux pas. The Youth League had no mandate to make such pronouncements, as its task is to mobilise the youth under your banner and to agitate for policy shift from within. But the truth will out, and that truth is that many of us felt this way about the Botswana government. A year later, I would journey into working with civil society youth movements trying to put pressure on the stubborn Botswana government to ratify and domesticate the African Youth Charter, and would find myself reflecting back on comrade Julius’s correct arguments.
On 1 March 2012, South Africa woke up to headlines announcing comrade Julius’s expulsion. The news sent shockwaves throughout the country. Many of us who had been following the developments of the case since August of the previous year had expected him to be suspended, not expelled. He had the option of appealing the sentence with your National Disciplinary Committee of Appeals, or of employing delay tactics that would drag the matter on until the Mangaung elective congress in December of that year, from where he could mobilise delegates with voting powers to have the sanction nullified. But it didn’t look likely that the sentence would be changed, and so many of us reconciled ourselves to the reality that the ANC Youth League was losing one of its greatest potential leaders.
The downfall of comrade Malema hit me harder than I could have imagined, perhaps because there was something in him that had represented something that I identified with. There were many things about comrade Julius that I didn’t agree with. I found him to be an insufferable male chauvinist, an opinion I had formed during Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. Having led the ‘Friends of Jacob Zuma’ brigade, Malema had been at the forefront of the onslaught against the woman who had laid the charges against Mr Zuma, accusing her of being a pawn in a political game and lying about the alleged sexual assault. I also didn’t agree with how he addressed his elders. A level of respect must be maintained at all times when engaging elders, no matter how much one’s opinion differs from theirs. This is a principle I believe in and one that comrade Malema clearly does not. And yet, despite all this, I believed strongly that comrade Julius was a rough diamond that needed polishing. In him, I saw the future of South Africa, and that future was a triumphant one.
One evening, as I sat on my bed, I found myself in tears over what was happening to him. In many ways, I was crying for the many voiceless poor black people who now no longer had someone to speak on their behalf, someone who understood the brutality of the black condition. You had long forgotten what that condition looked like. It ended when you institutionalised maladministration and corruption, two cancers that eat away at the moral fibre of our society. It ended when you decided that it was correct to recall a sitting president who had done a lot for the development of our country. Some argued that comrade Julius too was a vessel that carried this cancer, that he too was corrupt. I didn’t want to get into debates that couldn’t be rooted in evidence. Sure, he tended to be vulgar in his opulence, buying and demolishing properties in affluent neighbourhoods, driving around in luxurious cars, drinking expensive liquor in the exorbitant restaurants and bars that he frequented. And in many ways, this was wrong. But comrade Malema was the closest thing to ourselves than anyone else at that point. He understood and articulated our struggles in ways that no one else could, because he knew them. He had lived those conditions. He identified with millions of us in townships who wanted nothing more than to not have to worry about where the next meal would come from.
In a state of anger, I took to Facebook. What I said at the time was that I wanted to challenge young people to view the ANC situation outside the cemented axis of interpretation that had been created by the media as well as the leadership and membership of both the ANC and the ANCYL: that Malema was reaping what he was responsible for sowing. This axis argued that, for a while, Malema had been wreaking havoc within the Alliance, taking part in ‘reckless’ behaviour that sought to undermine the ANC leadership and obliterate the culture of revolutionary discipline cemented in the oldest liberation movement on the African continent. The opposite side argued differently: that Malema was the fall guy in a savage game of dog-eat-dog politicking. That side alleged that Malema was paying the price for raising legitimate questions of those who benefit from having these questions out of public discourse, namely, you, the leadership of the ANC.
For those of us not privy to the internal matters of the ANC and its Youth League and who equally reject the often sensationalist interpretations of the media, the responsibility of dissecting the ANC crisis was left to our individual consciousness. I sought to look at the situation not from the angle of politicking but rather from a sociological perspective, viewing Malema as a person located within our society but with a political home within that society.
Malema could have been saved by many people at many points in his political journey but the chances were deliberately missed. The result of this was that a person who had immense potential to help Azania rewrite its narrative was dealt a political blow, making it virtually impossible for the audience who needed to listen to what he had to say to do so.
Malema was accused by the ANC NDC, the ANC leadership, membership and the general population of being the cause of the state of decay in the ANC. He was accused of being the cancer that infected and paralysed the Mass Democratic Movement. Some people even went as far as to claim that the decrease in the number of votes that the ANC had received at the previous elections was a direct result of Malema’s radical pronouncements over the past few years. I believed these assertions were an attempt to use Malema as a scapegoat for a problem that is of our collective creation and one that could and should have been addressed at its infancy.
In 2008, a year when the country was thrown into a dark abyss, Julius Malema emerged as a hero of a faction that was hell-bent on utilising any means necessary to remove what it saw as a problem in the ANC. At one particular event attended by ANC and Youth League leaders and members, Julius Malema had this to say: ‘The problem in this country is Thabo Mbeki and his people’. By this, Malema meant that the then president of the Republic of South Africa, Mr Mbeki, and his administration were the cause of the problems that the country was facing, socioeconomic and otherwise. Malema led a vicious campaign to unseat a constitutionally elected president, using methods unbecoming in a comrade, methods that ought to have left a bitter taste in the mouths of authentic patriots. Interestingly, at this point, at the zenith of his bad behaviour, Malema was not seen to be ill-disciplined or reckless. He was defined as a militant young person who spoke truth to power. We all clapped hands when he spoke, even when he was insulting elders. Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, ‘When you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor’. This statement is most apt in capturing the response of our society to Malema’s behaviour. We either justified his actions as being those of ‘a radical young person’ or we simply dismissed him with a shrug, never analysing the implications of our apathetic reaction to his uncouth behaviour.
Malema at the time seemed to be in the shadow of his political death. He faced an expulsion from an organisation he had dedicated years of his life to, an organisation that he poignantly called his ‘home’. Many people were sitting comfortably in their corners with smirks on their faces, saying, ‘He is ill-disciplined and must go!’ Few used the opportunity to reflect upon their role in Malema’s demise, which they didn’t realise had implications beyond the settling of political vendettas.
It cannot be debated that under Malema, the ANCYL reintroduced the one issue that this country has consistently ostracised from political discourse: the race question. The ANCYL under Malema came out with guns blazing, guns pointed at the enemy: the system that survives on the subjugation of black people, the system that has institutionalised Afrophobia. The rapture that was created by the ANCYL under Malema was necessary, because it forced all of us to examine our location within an Azania that cunningly buries truths in favour of reconciliatory approaches to solving urgent matters. That rapture was the reason for the slow build-up of confidence that became evident in a people who had almost forgotten that they had a place in this antiblack world.
Indeed, Malema was not innocent in all this. But, I believed, none of us was. We must, as a people, realise that it is our responsibility to put an end to the convenient politicking that is rapidly manifesting on the African continent. I could see that as a people, whether as activists or as the general population, we need to begin to condemn ill-discipline in its elementary stages, whether or not it benefits our objectives, because ill-discipline for us soon becomes ill-discipline against us. The result of our failure to address it in its infancy is that at some point it is going to threaten revolutionary gains.
I realised that student organisations, as factories where future leaders are manufactured, should lead the revolution of the annihilation of ill-discipline. It begins with fighting against SRC corruption and misappropriation of resources. It begins with ceasing the culture of electing leaders on the basis of popularity as opposed to electing them on the basis of capacity to deliver. But, more than that, it begins with all of us standing united in the struggle, which is a quest for the cleansing of a society that we want our own children to grow up in. We cannot continue to let problems manifest and only at the height of their development react to them. In Sesotho we say, thupa e kojoa e sale metsi.
My anger withered away as the months went by. I had come to accept that our country was not ready for the rapture that it was going to experience someday. I knew from this moment that there would come a time, in my lifetime, when youth militancy would be inevitable. It was clear to me that the downfall of comrade Julius had postponed this country’s fate. But fate cannot be fought. Someday, the South African youth was going to rise against you, because there was nothing normal about the situation in the ANC-led country. Nothing.