Can Julius Malema, the fire-breathing enfant terrible of South African politics, reinvent himself as a mellower figure more reminiscent of a capable executive officer? Probably not in time for the May 29 elections, just five weeks away.
The idea of an EFF coalition with the ANC frightens the markets and big business. One part of Malema does not mind that. Another part of him wants to be seen as a measured man who can be trusted in high office.
Malema would love to be in the post-May 29 cabinet, possibly as deputy president. That is not likely, in the same way an ANC-EFF coalition is highly improbable. The EFF will not have enough vote share to help the ANC over the line at the national level and in its two crucial battleground provinces — KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng — in one fell swoop. Instead, the DA has the upper hand somewhat. The ANC and the DA (and some of its allies in the multiparty charter) can form a national government, as well as ones in the provinces that will be hung.
On the campaign trail, Malema has walked a tightrope instead of engaging in his trademark hardline populist bluster.
The prospect of power shimmering like a mirage on the May 29 horizon has arguably softened (and perhaps blurred) his policies and approaches.
But style should not be confused with substance and detail. The red-overalls swagger remains, but Malema’s avowed little-guy populism and alleged grassroots power base has demonstrably given way to a more state-centred approach to redistribution and reconstruction. He’s still radical, but more gentlemanly now — elite, even.
In much the same way as the ANC in the mid-1990s took it for granted that its policies and laws would be realised by the state and its bureaucracy, Malema in 2024 does not appear to understand how much wishful thinking this line of thinking involves.
In his faith in the ability of the state to cure South Africa’s ills, Malema has, ideologically speaking, 'come home' to the ANC
Corrupt and self-seeking, the public service has morphed into a money-guzzling monster. But, even so, this lesson has also conveniently been lost on many in the ANC who centrally plan for it even more responsibilities. Meanwhile, in real-world South Africa, the president ignores his party to beg the private sector to help keep the country going.
In his faith in the ability of the state to cure South Africa’s ills, Malema has, ideologically speaking, “come home” to the ANC. He was expelled from the party in 2013 for, he claims, his radical policies on land and nationalising the banks and mines. Most tellingly, Malema has accused the ANC of reneging on its historic promise to restore the land to the people.
Not even the spectre of a Zimbabwe-style land grab was too much for Malema. His militant stance on land set him at odds with his erstwhile colleagues in the ANC, whose own halfhearted land redistribution programme, based on the willing buyer, willing seller model, buckled under the combined weight of neglect, corruption and maladministration. By contrast, Malema’s own prescription — that “the people” should seize the land — appealed to a historic sense of racial grievance undaunted by financing and administrative challenges.
Fast-forward to 2024 and it’s indisputable that the positions put forward by Malema this year confirm a crucial feature of Malema’s pre-election political thought: how he sees the state, rather than the people themselves, as the foundation of his envisaged political schema.
He retains the populist rhetoric, but at the heart of his and the EFF’s approach is an unshakeable belief in the power and the ability (let alone the willingness) of the state to bring about the changes he claims to believe are necessary.
Land and jobs remain the centrepiece of the EFF’s appeal, and the argument for land redistribution is still draped in the populist language of grievance.
He wants land redistribution done constitutionally, through “consultation”.
This is perhaps a far cry from the land grabs Malema and his party at local level have encouraged ahead of invasions of private property in the past.
But it also presupposes that the state that will somehow redistribute the land as Malema envisages can ever exist.
In his world view, the state will be taking on a lot more. For example, it will retain its coal energy monopoly, succeeding in turning Eskom around where the ANC has failed. But he has yet to say this openly.
In his optimistic view of how a future state “not driven by profit” would operate, the EFF’s outlook is not that different from the policy positions routinely advanced at ANC conferences, especially the idea of a “state bank” that would lend money more easily than the alleged banking monopoly.
Similarly with a mooted “state mining company” — another old chestnut from ANC conferences — which has never got off the ground.
While belief in the power of a big and interventionist state might be entirely misplaced given our particular historic circumstances, the convenience of dumping intractable problems in the hands of a somnolent bureaucracy has allowed the EFF to appear populist rather than just old-fashioned statist-Leninist.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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