As his firearm trial resumes in East London, Julius Malema has repeated his defence that he fired blanks from a toy gun to excite his followers. Sometimes the symbolism is so perfect that the jokes write themselves.
Back in 2018, when MK party was still just a twinkle in Jacob Zuma’s bank account and Malema was still quietly confident that the EFF might win an election this century, the play-play commander in chief was filmed firing what looked like a semi-automatic rifle into the sky at a rally in Mdantsane.
The party immediately closed ranks, claiming that the rifle had been a toy firing blanks, and that AfriForum’s claims to the contrary were racist.
In 2022, however, the state’s forensic ballistic expert, Col Mandisi Mngwadleka, linked an expended casing found at the scene with the rifle.
Which brings us up to the present, and a new twist in the case: according to another expert, testifying on behalf of Malema this week, the casing could have come from anywhere. You know, the way people at rallies are always throwing bullet casings at the speakers on the stage.
More importantly, he said, Mngwadleka was wrong. He had studied both the rifle and the casing, and could see no link between them.
Of course, he explained, he hadn’t studied them physically, but he’d definitely looked at pictures of both. And sure, the pictures hadn’t been ultra-high definition images from a microscope but rather from a cellphone, but still, he said, “new cameras of the day, some of them are as good as a microscope”.
That’s case closed as far as I’m concerned. I mean, if we can’t trust scientific conclusions drawn on the basis of a photo emailed from an iPhone, then we might as well disband the justice system right now.
Still, for those pedants who wanted more evidence, Malema and his team offered another compelling argument: people didn’t run for cover when Malema fired the rifle, which proves that they knew it wasn’t real.
All of which presents a pretty solid case, which I would like to summarise as follows:
1. EFF supporters are able to tell the difference between live and blank ammunition simply by hearing it being fired about 50 metres away.
2. If the ammunition is blank, they are excited by it, and more liable to vote for the man firing it.
3. If it is live, they are frightened and run away.
4. They did not run away. Therefore the new discipline of acoustic ballistic psychology tells us that the ammunition was blank.
5. Since the expert isn’t willing to testify that the empty casing came from the rifle Malema fired, we have to assume that it arrived on the stage in one of two ways:
5.1: The dog ate my homework and I was so angry I threw one of my empty casings at it, missed, and the casing flew to Mdantsane and landed in the stadium.
5.2: A counterrevolutionary who had, entirely coincidentally, smuggled a crate of empty casings into the stadium saw Malema fire the toy gun, saw a chance to discredit him, accurately assessed the calibre of the rifle, rummaged through their crate, found the right calibre, rushed the stage, planted the casing, then melted away into the crowd.
6. The defence rests.
Yes, it’s all very silly, but not as silly, I humbly submit, as the EFF looks trying to argue this performance of fake militarism after its dismal showing in the election. It’s one thing to pretend that you’re the vanguard of the revolution in 2018, but as of May 29 it’s a vanguard that’s lost 350,000 fighters since the last election.
Finally, speaking of people whose grift is a performance of outrage, albeit, in this case, with an extra dash of victimhood, I’d like to send thoughts and prayers to Renaldo Gouws as he ends the shortest parliamentary career in South Africa's history, no doubt to focus on his YouTube channel where he and like-minded people — or, in the absence of minds, people of similar urges — can tell each other and the whole internet how they’ve been silenced.
He will not be missed.
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