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The Reader With Lovemore  Ranga Mataire
Sometime in 2011, Fiona Forde, an Irish journalist who lives in Cape Town published a book: An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the “new” ANC, in which she alluded to the diminishing strength of South Africa’s leadership in building a cohesive nation-state.

She alluded to the prevailing situation as a state of interregnum, a vacuum created by a lack of a coherent and decisive leadership incapable of reconnecting with its glorious history as a leftist revolutionary movement as enshrined in its Freedom Charter.

In other words, the so-called Rainbow Nation had become a façade, a mirage in the perspectives of the multitudes of South Africans who remained on the fringes of mainstream economic activities.

While the book is a contemporary biographical text on Malema, the then leader of the ANC youth league facing eminent expulsion or suspensions for various misdemeanours, his incisive surgical examination of what had become of South Africa has become prophetic given the recent xenophobic attacks that gripped the “Rainbow Nation” gallantly bestowed by the first black President Nelson Mandela.

Fashioned in his typical demagoguery rhetoric, Malema highlights the fact that the country’s level of economic inequality remains the highest in the world and that wealth distribution is racially skewed with whites having a huge stake. The issues raised by Malema are essential in understanding the disconnection suffered by the ANC as it assumed power. A point to note is that at independence, Malema was just a 13-year-old and despite his youth, he rose through the ranks to become one of the most dominant voices articulating the aspirations of the once oppressed blacks.

“Julius Malema was 13 when apartheid came to an end and he lived the rest of his formative years in the democratic dispensation. But for him and many others, 1994 did not bring transformation overnight. His teen years were very tough and the Malema family struggled to get by. The poverty that hung over that household in some ways became more endemic because it was one of the families that 1994 left behind,” writes Forde.

In short, Malema’s message to South Africa is simple and nakedly honest: South Africa is not yet Uhuru. Born to an epileptic and emotionally challenged mother, Malema derives his moral mandate in raising these issues from his upbringing in one of the poorest suburbs (Disteneng) in South Africa. According to Forde, Malema is touching on hot political issues like land reform, the need to share wealth, nationalisation and the need for the African majority to be at the centre of decision making processes. Malema is frustrated at the slow pace of transformation.

The second issue is that of the economy, which 17 years after majority rule is still in the hands of whites. The state’s grip of the economy is weak and the fact that so many of the large corporations are still controlled by whites does little to nurture solid state capital relations. Third, its judiciary, which is lauded by many pundits as independent, is still a sad relic of the apartheid era despite being headed by a black judge. The same cannot be said of Zimbabwe where we have completely indigenised the bench to reflect the demographic balance and our aspirations as a nation.

Fourth, Malema is convinced that the security sector in South Africa is maladjusted. Very few South Africans can be proud of their army, which during the formative years of that country’s majority rule could not be sent to any peace keeping missions because the various combat groups patched together under the SANDF could not gel.

Widespread prevalence of crime is also testimony to a combination of debilitating factors, which include the breakdown of the social fabric owing to the high unemployment rate and the second is the non-integration of the police force, which seems to have different command structures.