The Nats were known for matchbox houses and toilets in the veld, the ANC for RDP houses and corrugated iron shacks, and now from the EFF comes the very last word in residential upliftment for the poor — the “spacious house”. Recently, and to demonstrate how seriously they take women, the EFF unveiled on Twitter three such homes at an undisclosed location, which three lucky gogos are going to move into. Actually, they may already be living there, judging from the washing on the line seen in the pictures released to mark the historic moment. And they seem to have DStv fitted as well, so perhaps the EFF wanted to make sure the gogos were settled down nicely and watching Big Brother re-runs in this little Potemkin village of grandmother dreams lost and found.
You’ve got to hand it to EFF leader Julius Malema, though, even if you are tempted to dismiss this latest publicity stunt as a, well, publicity stunt. He’s a paint-by-numbers one-stop grievance shop. He is Ithuba, the Gift of the Givers, Clientele Legal, B’nai B’rith and the Catholic Women’s League rolled into one. Need a new house? Malema is your man. Can’t find your gogo? No problem. Lost your job? Sit back, and Malema will dispatch a cackle of clowns in red to terrorise your workplace and compel your boss to hand you the employee of the month award. With his quirky brand of high-profile events and utterances, combined with a cynical welfarism and an adoring twitterati, Malema is solving the problems faced by the masses, one case at a time, feeding on blissful sentimentality and creating the illusion of politics with a caring heart. No tough choices for him, and all the while picking at the raw wounds of racism, envy, poverty and hopelessness.
Malema’s bag of tricks is big enough for every occasion, his grasp of matters so quick and intuitive that he hardly needs the hours of painstaking study and dedication lesser mortals in the political realm require. Have a look at him in a YouTube video insulting former health minister Zweli Mkhize, who had bought us “fong kong'' vaccines, the name of which he recalled thanks to some “fighters” sitting alongside him. And the reason for this AstraZeneca fong kong purchase? You guessed it, an Indian connection, because as we well know Mkhize is from KwaZulu-Natal, so it all fits together, doesn’t it? This, we are told, is because Mkhize “wants to eat”. To illustrate his point, Malema acts out “eating” with both hands, and you could see quite a lot of practice had gone into his “eating". India, he repeats, with an expression of disdain, most guys reserve for ex-wives.
No tough choices for him, and all the while picking at the raw wounds of racism, envy, poverty and hopelessness.
Party-pooper me, though, to hoot at the double-parked bakkie-load of hypocrisy Malema brings to every political occasion. I know we’re not meant to scoff at the EFF because they’ve got a few newly-minted university graduates in their ranks, but is anyone really taken in by this nonsense? OK, maybe they do have neatly bound volumes of crash-course-erudition policy, lost somewhere in the boot of Malema’s luxury car. But even if they do, does anyone really not believe that it is the last word of the Commander-in-Chief that is the real policy?
In the same video, Malema is all praise for Zimbabwe’s Covid-19 vaccination programme. This great son of Africa tells us mock wide-eyed that Zimbabwe has a better vaccination programme than SA. Can you believe it? The horror. Of course, his convenient aligning with the stereotype that Zimbabwe would obviously be worse than SA goes without comment. Zimbabwe, he repeats in disbelief, which is how most of his neighbours in his plush suburb would no doubt react. But wait, there’s more: the man of the people is thinking about doing the elite thing and getting to Zimbabwe for his own jab. Oh, and why does he like Zimbabwe’s vaccine drive so much? It’s because they use the Chinese, not Indian, vaccine (Sinovac, the red overalls beside him chip in helpfully). No “fong kong” here, please.
It doesn’t matter that much to Malema that many of our epidemiologists felt the government would have saved lives, the lives of people he purports to care so much about, by distributing the initial AstraZeneca doses here. That’s the kind of pesky detail that gets in the way of a good EFF policy, which is a broad stroke, rage-against-the-machine alloy of raw atavism and uninformed wishful thinking. Empirical study counts for nothing, reputations even less when the elephant that is the EFF starts swinging its trunk in the policy chamber. A nuke for every flea. Even “Milkpark'' hospital gets a dose of EFF policy: “overrated” declares Malema, because one of his celebrity friends, the late actor Shona Ferguson, died there.
Even ‘Milkpark’ hospital gets a dose of EFF policy: ‘overrated’ declares Malema, because one of his celebrity friends, the late actor Shona Ferguson, died there.
The EFF’s Twitter chorus is as good value as its leader. Don’t criticise Malema for bashing Milpark Hospital, admonishes one of them primly, because you didn’t say anything when he attacked Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital a few years ago. Huh? It turns out Malema’s EFF conducted a “study” of our public hospitals in 2018, the highlight of which was his visiting Bara and declaring it fit only for president Cyril Ramaphosa’s buffaloes, before disappearing back to the suburbs in a dusty stampede of shiny cars. Very helpful.
Absurd, really, but here are a few mistakes we could make as a country in discerning Malema’s future role and place. Let’s not forget he’s anointed himself for high office. After all, he told no less an expert in these things, former president Jacob Zuma, that he would one day be president. We could go very wrong by, 1) taking him seriously, 2) refusing to take him seriously because he is a hypocrite who cares nothing for a South African future that doesn’t involve standoff and acrimony, and 3) writing him off because the people in their democratic wisdom will see through his antics. They won’t, and that is because rationality has nothing to do with how people vote. A vote is not a conclusion reached after rigorous research and scrutiny: rather, a vote is a wish, a ticket in the lotto, a chance to let off steam, a rare opportunity to stick it to the big guy. It’s an affair of the heart, not the mind.
With a housing policy that consists of just three houses in an incognito suburb, Malema has planted a seed. Never mind that the ANC has in fact built millions of houses under its watch, or that jobs are our prime concern, not “spacious'' living quarters. How many voters in the next election will be people who feel let down by the ANC, people on never-ending RDP housing lists? Too many. Can anyone really argue they have a better chance of getting their promised house from the ANC than one of the EFF’s “spacious houses”? No wonder he’s so confident.
Sunday Times Daily
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