Julius Malema: South Africa’s next kingmaker?

The leader of South Africa’s second-largest opposition party is waging a war of words with the world’s richest person after being accused of “pushing for genocide of white people”.

Elon Musk, who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, launched an online attack against Julius Malema in response to footage showing the politician and supporters at a mass rally in Soweto chanting “Kill the Boer” – a reference to the country’s historical white settler community. Musk tagged President Cyril Ramaphosa in a tweet asking: “Why do you say nothing?”

Malema and Musk appear determined to “tear each other apart” over the “controversial song”, said Africanews. Malema told reporters last week that Musk “seems illiterate”. The “only thing that protects him is his white skin”, added the politician, who is celebrating the tenth anniversary of his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party as latest polling suggests he could hold the balance of power after next year’s general election.

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Who is Julius Malema?

Born in 1981 to a single mother who was a domestic worker, Malema grew up in poverty in a segregated black township attached to Pietersberg. Now renamed Polokwane, the provincial town was “a redoubt of Afrikaner conservatism”, said South African writer and scholar Jonny Steinberg in The Guardian.

Malema was a “militant and very successful political activist at high school”, Steinberg wrote, and climbed through the ranks of the radical Congress of South African Students. The budding politician became known as “tough, playing dirty against those who opposed him for office, disbanding branches of the organisation that did not support him and at times taking to his opponents with his fists”.

He shot to national prominence in 2007 as the leader of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League in his home province of Limpopo. Malema had long aligned himself with Jacob Zuma, who became president in 2009, and once “declared publicly that the youth were not only prepared to die for Zuma, they would kill for him too”, added Steinberg.

But after the two politicians fell out, Malema was expelled from the party in 2012, in “an effort to ease racial tensions in the country”, reported Forbes.

Citing Venezuela’s former president Hugo Chávez as his role model, a year later he founded the far-left EFF, which has pledged to redistribute land from white farmers without compensation.

Malema was elected to a seat in the National Assembly in 2014, the same year that he married his long-term girlfriend, by whom he has two sons.

The EFF leader, who also has a son from a previous relationship, was re-elected for a second five-year parliamentary term in 2019.

Populist, opportunist… or both?

Depending on who you ask, Malema is “a populist, an opportunist, or both”, said CNN’s Faith Karimi.

While building “from scratch his own political party”, said the BBC’s Johannesburg-based correspondent Nomsa Maseko, Malema returned to education to graduate from the University of South Africa with a BA in communication and African languages in 2016. A year later, he was awarded an honours degree in philosophy.

He is now seen as “something of a trendsetter,” Maseko wrote, with “an increasing number of politicians and celebrities finishing school while others are furthering their studies”.

Malema has argued that “it is only through education that we’ll be able to reclaim black pride”. Addressing supporters earlier this year, he said: “Go back to school if you want to lead the EFF or the country.”

He is also “no stranger to showmanship, and controversy, often coming under fire for being a polarising figure whose performances are drenched in a fiery, but essentially empty, rhetoric”, said Cape Town-based site news24.

Malema was acquitted of hate speech by the Equality Court last year. But he has been accused repeatedly over the years of inciting violence and promoting controversial songs urging the targeting of white South Africans.

Given the “current economic climate, and growing unemployment, you would be hard-placed not to understand the allure of Malema, aka the wizard, especially for potential young voters”, news24 added.

According to the BBC’s Maseko, many young people “disagree with Malema’s style of politics”, which “has led to fist-fights in parliament” and attempts to prevent President Ramaphosa from delivering keynote speeches. But with youth unemployment currently at a “shocking” 51%, “they still respect him”.

What next for Malema and the EFF?

Despite his high profile, Malema’s party has won only “modest support” at the ballot box, said The Times’s Africa correspondent Jane Flanagan. The EFF is currently the third-largest party in parliament, behind the ANC and Democratic Alliance.

Yet the EFF “could emerge as political kingmakers” at next year’s general election, when the ruling ANC is expected to lose its overall majority for the first time since Apartheid ended three decades ago.

That could make Malema “a likely candidate for deputy president, or at least a potential seat in the cabinet”, Flanagan predicted.