Moral of the Juju puppet show

07 February 2013 - 02:41 By Brendan Boyle
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now
Brendan Boyle
Brendan Boyle
Image: The Dispatch

As the South African Revenue Service closes in on Julius Malema, I find myself wondering whether to think of him as the villain of his story or its victim.

While he appears to be keeping his chin up as his world collapses around him, Malema must be stunned by the speed of his fall from ANC grace. Just months ago he was on the A-list of every empowered black hostess; now, as he says himself, he can barely get anyone to take his calls.

The smart cars are gone, the armed bodyguards are gone, his properties have been attached as security for a reported tax debt of R16-million, and the criminal case against him seems to be gaining momentum as former friends move to save their own skins.

It will be hard for some of us not to give in to schadenfreude after years of his gross arrogance and his absurd insistence that all the bling he attached to himself was honestly acquired from his modest salary as the ANC Youth League's president - or as unconditional gifts from the dear friends who have now abandoned him in such numbers.

Absent any tax rebate at all, that tax debt implies a pre-tax income of at least R40-million. That is a lot of unconditional generosity to explain away.

The way Malema threatened even revered ANC veterans who refused to toe his line was sickening to many who could not understand why the party let him get away with it, even when the cost in lost international investment became impossible to ignore.

As it turns out, however, Malema was no more than the classic useful idiot of big-league politics who took himself more seriously than anyone around him.

Even knowing the limits of his role, however, his masters stuck with him when he began to pronounce on issues from international relations to job creation without checking with them. Nor did they repudiate his presidential ambitions.

So while he came to believe that he was the puppet master, he was always just the puppet.

In her book An Inconvenient Youth, Fiona Forde tells the story of a precocious township urchin who inveigled himself into the local structures of the ANC and worked his way up through its ranks until, not entirely honestly, he won control of the party's youth league.

It is a remarkable story about a boy with no prospects who seized the one opportunity that came his way and squeezed it for everything he could.

His early rise caught the tail end of a period in which the ANC needed to break before it could build. His robust style and vigorous oratory suited that stage of the transformation from white rule to democratic control of the state and its institutions. No one asked him to do anything really constructive - to make anything. That wasn't his role. He was supposed to be an agent of change.

When companies which he allegedly helped to win contracts built roads that quickly collapsed, no one from government or the ANC knocked on his door looking for an explanation. He was allowed, like the useful idiot he was, to believe he was playing the game as it was supposed to be played.

Probably because of his lack of political experience, Malema made the fatal mistake of backing a doomed challenge to the incumbent party elite. He thought he had graduated from tender-fixer to kingmaker and stopped listening to his counsellors.

That is when the puppet-master finally cut the strings and the puppet collapsed in a heap, unable to stand, unable to dance and unable any more to point the way to mountains of wealth.

Good riddance, one might say, and rightly so. We are better off without a fool muddying the waters of economic planning and international relations. Perhaps it was a lucky escape for he might have been closer than we knew to the Pinocchio moment when the puppet takes on a life of its own.

He was cruelly used by a faction who thought his bluster useful to them and who, as recent events show, promise no loyalty. Stripped of his political cover, he could even face prison time.

The ANC does not owe Malema wealth, but it does owe him an apology.

His tale should caution those who believe there is such an easy path to great wealth and power.

For the rest of us, it should be a reminder of the danger of opportunistic political populism. Malema might not have made it to the top as he expected, but there are plenty of examples of others a bit like him who did.

Benito Mussolini, Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa and, though not all would lump him in the group, Muammar Gaddafi, show where things can go when a political puppet gets a life of its own.

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now