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 Public Forum: A Future with or Without Malema 
 

DDP kicked off the 2012 public forums with a provocative topic – Julius Malema: his rise to fame and what the future may hold for the man and the organisation he heads, the ANC Youth League. The event was held on the first day of the appeal against the ANC Disciplinary Committee verdict of November 2011, which saw him removed as ANCYL president and his membership of the ANC suspended for 5 years.

Fiona Forde, author of the recent biography ‘An Inconvenient Youth: Julia Malema and the ‘new’ ANC’, started the conversation by mapping the transformation of Malema from young activist to national phenomenon. His rise through the ranks of COSAS and the ANCYL was described, as well as his targeting of ‘the masses’ – the approx 40 million South Africans who are unemployed, underemployed, domestic workers, petrol pump attendants, youth and those affected by poor service delivery. He has chosen to focus on issues not generally seen to be ‘youth issues’ – nationalization and land reform. He has also been open about addressing the failures of the ANC, for example the failure of the land reform programme.

The discussion also turned to what has prompted Malema’s fall from grace. There appear to be various elements which have contributed to this – his popular engagement with the poor and disadvantaged is compromised by his very visible and ostentatious signs of newly acquired wealth; the ill-disciplined and disrespectful manner in which he addresses issues; and perhaps most fundamentally – the power which he wields has become a threat to President Zuma.

Other issues discussed included the role of the media in creating the phenomenon; the role of his upbringing in a poor household; his allegiance with various players, particularly in Limpopo, and the role of the Youth League within the ANC.
 

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Recent Articles

Tides of Oppurtunity are Changing

By Imraan Buccus, January 2012

 THE TIDES of history are turning. Outside of the social democracies in the north and the German powerhouse in the centre, European power is on the wane.

Brazil, India and China are the waking giants of the future. Economies are rising across much of Africa too.

But in southern Europe, as well as Ireland and England, and, of course, America, the decline is steep.

Poverty is spreading and the rich are retreating to gated enclaves. In these countries, young people face a future much tougher than the life faced by their parents.

Greece and Spain simply have no short term economic prospects at all. In Athens, thousands of young graduates and professionals queue at the Australian and American consulates. In Madrid, the bright young minds are looking to Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela. In Lisbon thousands of Portuguese professionals queue at the Angolan and Mozambican embassies.

The descendants of Vasco da Gama and his crew are not leaving to plunder new worlds for the old; they are simply escaping old Europe as it sinks into a crisis so profound that there’s no clear way out aside from placing more demands on the German taxpayer.

There are more than 4.3million Portuguese living abroad. The Portuguese have even become an essential part of the fabric of SA life. Peri peri chicken is as South African as pap, the bunny chow or boerewors.

Ruinous
Of course the 15th century emigration from Portugal has very little similarity with that of 2012. The same is true of the emigration of the 1950s and 1960s. In those days the Portuguese coming to Africa started as workers, many in low paid jobs in Angola and Mozambique, and then moved up the economic ladder that colonial regimes created for white people. They made a good life there for themselves and their families.

The collapse of colonialism, however, and the ruinous economic policies adopted by the “Marxist-Leninist” regimes in Angola and Mozambique created new waves of emigration, either to SA or back to Portugal. Portugal laboured under a neo-fascist dictatorship from the 1920s to the 1970s,  but after it joined the EU in 1986 all kinds of opportunities opened up.

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