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We’ve been chasing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema all week and finally get hold of him yesterday morning. “Can we chat quickly?” I ask. “No, I’m off to launch a newspaper that will outsell City Press,” says Malema.
My heart sinks. But it turns out the young politician is not adding a third big-news item to his action-packed week.
On Wednesday evening, Malema graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political leadership and citizenship from the University of SA.
On Thursday, he was in court to hear Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng declare that President Jacob Zuma had failed to uphold, respect and defend the Constitution.
The EFF is lead applicant in the case against Speaker of the National Assembly Baleka Mbete and Zuma. The court compacted the hearing to include the official opposition DA, the public and the anti-corruption campaigning organisation Corruption Watch because the issues were the same.
In a nutshell, it was a hearing into the illegal enrichment of the president through the misspending of public funds on the private sections of the estate at Nkandla. And the finding is likely to stand precedent in all future cases about corruption, and the role and power of the constitutional institutions set up to protect the public against corruption and rights abuses.
The unanimous judgment by 11 justices of the Constitutional Court this week is thus a watershed case and the EFF is credited with bringing it. A political leader of the streets, and more recently of Parliament, the judgment now takes Malema and his nascent EFF into the realm of law and the courts.
In August, the EFF will be three years old – how did Malema raise a toddler of a political party while studying?
“It was not easy,” he says, recalling with rancour how he studied while facing a disciplinary hearing at the ANC when he was its Youth League president. “The day Derek Hanekom expelled me, I was writing an exam.”
Hanekom, in his capacity as chair of the national disciplinary committee, and current Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa led the charge against Malema.
A year later, Malema formed the EFF and postponed his midyear exams to fight his first national election. The party achieved 8% of the vote in the 2014 election and has since gone on to take an agenda-setting role in South African politics with the campaign called #PayBackTheMoney, a slogan used to demand that President Zuma refund the fiscus. That campaign resulted in this week’s judgment.
After the inaugural election, Malema wed accountant Mantwa Matlala in December 2014 and her prodding kept him studying.
“That was the problem with my wife. If I said I was going to wake up to study, she shook me at 4am, saying, ‘You said you were going to study’.”
He would get up to study and then sweat over the books until late at night. Social media was twittering with news of Malema’s graduation on Wednesday, and all the major newspapers and news bulletins had it at the top of their agendas – an illustration of how highly regarded education (specifically adult education) is in South Africa. In a tip of the graduate’s cap, Malema shrugged off an albatross – the “H” for Woodwork that has haunted him.
“What is important is to have education. The more you read, the more you realise you don’t know. You develop your knowledge and understanding of issues. You don’t have to rely on advisers,” he says. This last part may or may not be a riff on President Zuma’s statement blaming poor legal advice for the judgment against him this week.
How did Malema feel about the president’s national address on Friday night? “I felt very angry. Zuma undermines us big time. Wrong legal advice cannot be an excuse in law. The fact is, his acts amount to illegality. The president is an adult, not a child.”
Zuma is, at 73 years old, four decades the senior of the young man who has become his nemesis. Where to from here?
Malema has a clear battle plan for his red brigade, but he ends our conversation on a line that makes me think some of his blood is still a little green, black and gold, the colours of the governing ANC. Among the young politician’s many quotable quotes is the one saying his blood runs in those colours.
The EFF will join the parliamentary opposition’s joint motion to impeach the president. “I want the ANC to reject that. It must be in Hansard, on the record for generations to come, to see that we tried to get the ANC and its president to do the right thing.”
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