Becoming angry over the statements and antics of politicians would be like kicking a puppy for soiling the carpet – it doesn’t know what it’s done wrong, it’s simply part of its nature.
I’ve learned to ignore them. However, if there is one man who can get my back up it’s the EFF’s illustrious leader, Julius Malema.
I’ll tell you why this is.
He is an incredibly astute politician. He knows which buttons to press in order to get the votes he needs. He knows very well that the more pushback he receives from other political parties and the media the more successful his electoral campaign in South Africa will be. That’s OK – that’s what politicians do- they push buttons.
I need to give a little background as to why he gets my hackles up.
I was recently rereading Paul Theroux’s ‘Dark Star Safari’ about his trip overland from Cairo to Cape Town.
I have a fond love/hate relationship with Mr Theroux. On the one hand I find that he is tremendously acerbic, on the other hand there can be no doubt that he gets under the skin of the communities that he visits on his travels – he does the same with people. There is of course the small matter of the fact that he writes incredibly well and his research is top notch. He is a fabulous student of the human condition. In Dark Star Safari his love for Africa shines thorugh like a beacon.
I heartily recommend ‘The Happy Isles of Oceana’, ‘The Old Patagonia Express’, ‘Dark Star Safari’ and off course ‘Mosquito Coast’.
Now to return to the question of our friend Mr Malema.
Some pages into Dark Start Safari Paul Theroux is crossing Lake Victoria on his way from Uganda to Tanzania on a commercial ferry carrying a variety of goods.
He chats to the Captain about what cargo they are carrying. The Captain replies that they carry freight cars that are sealed so he does not know what they contain, but from time to time they carry coffee, cashews, tea, cotton and cloves from Zanzibar across the Lake.
Paul Theroux then asks ‘what about cloth?’
The Captain responds ‘We have only one factory now. W e sell our cotton, we don’t make it into cloth.’
And Theroux’s musing on this state of affairs goes to the heart of why Julius Malema is unique among politicians in his ability to annoy me.
Theroux observes:
‘Forty years of independent rule and foreign investment, forty years of mind-deadening political rhetoric about Ujamaa (Familyhood) and ‘African socialism,’ nationalization and industrialization and neutrality, and this vast fertile country of nearly 20 million people had achieved a condition of near bankruptcy and had one factory.’
And that goes to the heart of why Malema infuriates me. He is a supposedly educated man who is well aware of the results of following the path that he proposes for South Africa – yet in service of his own agenda he is willing to lie to the electorate while obfuscating and bending the truth to breaking point – and possibly do the country enormous harm.
Par for the course you might say – he’s a politician, but he does it while adding a healthy dose of racism and playing the blame game to perfection. He has blamed the Jews, the Indians, white business, farmers, the media, the ruling party, the offical opposition and climate change (amongst many others) for the sub standard living conditions of the majority of South Africa’s citizens. He has never found a cause or a whipping boy that he could not vilify to suit his own agenda.
That agenda is transparent. He has no intention of trying to win the next elections in South Africa (nor would have a chance of doing so). His intention is to damage the ANC support base to the extent that it needs to partner with the EFF to control municipalities across the nation so that he can join the looting of this country. He wants to be a kingmaker.
It is the sheer cynicism that gets me. I really should pay no attention at all. But as usual it is those voters who tick next to his name on 08 May 2019 that will be betrayed. Then he will simply start the blame game all over again.
I should stick by a maxim I truly believe in order to simply ignore him – ‘no matter how many times you vote, and for whom – you always end up with politicans’.
The Picking Ground. 