Publications
Partners
In January 2009, ahead of the national general elections, then ANC Youth League president Julius Sello Malema passed on the chance to take up a seat in Parliament.
“I am humbled and feel very honoured by the nomination. I thank the branches for showing confidence in me, but I had to decline,” said the 28-year-old Malema.
Asked why he had declined the offer, he said: “It [Parliament] is for old people.”
He said he would reconsider his position in 10 or 15 years. Fast forward to this year, Malema is in Parliament where he now sits across the aisle from ANC members, the party whose offer he rejected. That year he also made the call for the country’s mines to be nationalised.
“At the moment, when the imperialist forces are accepting the failures of capitalism, we should ask whether the time has not arrived for government to make sure that the state owns the mines and other means of production as called for in the Freedom Charter,” he said.
The years between 2010 and 2012 proved to be eventful for the young man from Seshego in Limpopo as he fought the media, faced allegations of corruption and turned against then president Jacob Zuma. It was in 2012 that the ANC’s national disciplinary committee chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the news that Malema had been expelled from the governing party for a raft of issues, including comments on regime change in Botswana and bringing the ANC and its president into disrepute.
Youth league NEC members Pule Mabe and Lebogang Maile were alleged to be among those who turned against Malema. Those who remained in his corner included his deputy Ronald Lamola, secretary general Sindiso Magaqa and spokesperson Floyd Shivambu.
The national elective conference of the ANC held in Mangaung in 2012 put the final nail in the coffin, dismissing Malema’s appeal to be bought back into the fold. It was a move which became the catalyst for Malema’s next chapter, which would see him becoming instrumental in eating away at the ANC’s long standing political hegemony.
In July 2013 Malema, alongside Shivambu, announced the formation of a new political party, the EFF. He took with him the radical stance on economic policies he first touted in the youth league and a year later convinced 1.1 million South Africans of his cause, making the EFF the third biggest party in Parliament.
In 2014, Malema entered Parliament with 24 EFF MPs who proceeded to flip the script on the stale sittings and poor accountability. The EFF set its sights on removing the man who in 2008 Malema had said he would kill for.
“If you arrest him, he will lead us from prison,” Malema reportedly said of Zuma then.
The EFF MPs were repeatedly physically ejected from Parliament for refusing to be addressed by Zuma.
Malema maintained the assault on Zuma even as his party faced its first big challenge with four MPs accusing him of misusing party funds.
Khanyisile Litchfield-Tshabalala, Andile Mngxitama, Lucky Twala and Mpho Ramakatsa proved to be the litmus test that the three-year-old organisation dealt with seamlessly. All four were expelled from the party and they failed dismally when they tried to form a breakaway party before disappearing into the political wilderness.
In a landmark judgment in 2016, the Constitutional Court found that Zuma had failed to uphold the Constitution in a case brought before it by the EFF, DA and other opposition parties.
In the same year the party became kingmakers in three of the country’s major municipalities, disrupting the ANC’s stranglehold on power. Zuma eventually resigned and in a successive win for the EFF just months later, Parliament adopted a proposal to amend section 25 of the Constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation – one of its founding policy pillars.
But last year a report into the looting and collapse of the VBS Mutual Bank appeared to momentarily check the blanket adoration the EFF had been enjoying. Shivambu’s brother Brian, was accused of getting a slice of the R1.6 billion pie. Since then a series of media reports have alleged that funds from the bank were channelled to the EFF leaders through various businesses.
Malema and Shivambu have maintained their innocence even as the questions keep coming.
A lot can change in 10 years. This year Magaqa is no longer around, having died in 2017 in a hail of bullets in an alleged political assassination in his home town of Umzimkhulu in KwaZulu-Natal where he was an ANC councillor. Lamola is now the minister of justice and correctional services. He maintains that Malema’s expulsion from the ANC was a blunder.
“It was a wrong decision, there was no need [to expel him]. Even at the time, we told the ANC that we did not agree [with the decision]. But the NEC as the highest decision-making structure, made that decision so there was nothing we could do and we were not prepared to go to court,” Lamola said.
Shivambu sits at Malema’s right hand in Parliament, along with 42 other EFF MPs. Last week thousands of delegates renewed their mandates as president and deputy president of the EFF. They too now have the powers to preside over the expulsion of members who don’t toe the line and deny their appeal to return.
The second national people’s assembly chose to uphold the expulsion of eight members whose appeal failed.
“We are in charge here. We are not playing games,” Malema said following his re-election. My simple thing of being elected unopposed is very simple, I work very hard. I don’t take anything for granted.
“You give it to me, I will work on it and perfect it. I pay attention to the smallest detail. I know everything that is happening in this conference, even if you want to hate me you will come to accept ... I am not a dictator, I am a hard worker. I come from nothing, born of a domestic worker who suffered from epilepsy. I worked my way up here single-handedly, knowing where I come from. So I do not care who thinks what about me.”
 |
| ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
